Compress a PDF in your browser — free, no upload. Light mode keeps text selectable; strong mode shrinks scans much more. Your file never leaves your device.
Drag and drop a PDF, or pick one from your device. It is processed right here in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Light keeps your text and structure intact (selectable text stays), with a modest size reduction. Strong rasterizes each page to an image — far smaller for scans and image-heavy PDFs, but the text becomes a picture.
Download the result and compare the before and after size. If a PDF is already optimized, the savings may be small — we show you the real numbers rather than pretend.
No. Compression happens entirely in your browser using pdf-lib and pdf.js in a Web Worker. Your file never leaves your device — unlike many PDF compressors, which upload your file to their servers.
Light re-saves the PDF more efficiently and strips metadata. Your text and structure are kept, so the text stays selectable and searchable — but the savings are modest (often 1-15%, sometimes none if the PDF is already optimized), and it does not re-compress embedded images. Strong rasterizes every page to a JPEG and rebuilds the PDF from those images. It compresses scans and image-heavy PDFs a lot (often by several times), but the text becomes an image: it can no longer be selected, searched or copied, and vector graphics are flattened.
That's honest and expected in some cases. Light can't shrink a PDF that is already optimized, so the size may barely change. Strong is built for scans and photos; on a mostly-text document, turning crisp text into a JPEG image can actually produce a larger file. We never silently swap in a bigger file — we show you the before and after size so you can keep the original if it was smaller.
Use Light for normal text documents when you want to keep selectable, searchable text. Use Strong for scanned documents and photo-heavy PDFs where size matters more than selectable text. For a text-only document, Strong is not recommended.
Honestly, it depends on what's inside the PDF — we don't promise an exact size. For scans and photo-heavy PDFs, Strong mode (with lower image quality and resolution) can often reach a small target like 100 KB. For text-rich PDFs there's a hard floor: shrinking a real text document down to 100 KB usually isn't possible without turning the text into a low-quality image and losing the ability to select or search it. We always show the real before and after size so you can decide.