stirling-tools/stirling-pdf

Stirling PDF is an open-source platform for editing and working with PDF documents. The README describes it as a way to edit, sign, redact, convert, and automate PDFs without sending the documents to external services, which is the main appeal: you keep your files on your own machine or your own server. You can run Stirling PDF in three different shapes. There is a personal desktop app, a browser-based UI you point at a local instance, and a self-hosted server deployment that exposes a private API. Quick-start instructions show running it as a Docker container that exposes its UI on port 8080. The project advertises more than 50 PDF tools covering common needs, editing, merging, splitting, signing, redacting, converting between formats, running OCR (reading text out of scanned PDFs), and compressing files. On top of these tools sit no-code workflow pipelines so you can chain operations together in the UI and process many files at once, plus REST APIs for nearly all tools so the same operations can be wired into other software. The README also lists enterprise features such as single sign-on, auditing, and flexible on-premise deployments, and notes the interface is translated into 40+ languages. Someone would use Stirling PDF when they need to manipulate PDFs frequently, splitting them, filling them, redacting sensitive content, or batch-converting, and either prefer not to upload documents to a third-party website or want to integrate PDF processing into their own systems. The project is described as open-core. According to the repository metadata, it is primarily written in TypeScript.