Why self-host your PDF tooling?
Cloud PDF services (SmallPDF, ILovePDF, Adobe Acrobat Online) are convenient — but every document you upload travels to a server you do not control, processed by software you cannot audit, stored in logs you cannot delete. For law firms, accounting practices, medical offices, or any team handling contracts, financial data or personally identifiable information, this is an unacceptable risk. Stirling PDF runs on your VPS: files are processed in memory, results are served back to your browser, and temporary data is deleted immediately. The MIT licence means the full source code is auditable and there is no vendor lock-in.
What Stirling PDF can do
- Merge multiple PDFs into one, or split a PDF into individual pages or ranges.
- Compress PDFs to reduce file size — useful before emailing large reports.
- Convert PDF to Word (.docx), Word to PDF, PDF to images (JPG/PNG/TIFF), images to PDF.
- OCR via Tesseract: turn scanned PDFs into searchable, copy-pasteable text — supports Arabic, French, English and 100+ other languages.
- Add watermarks, page numbers, headers, footers and Bates numbering in bulk.
- Redact sensitive text or regions before sharing a document externally.
- Password-protect or remove passwords from PDFs; edit metadata and flatten annotations.
- Compare two PDF versions side-by-side and highlight differences.
- Sign PDFs with digital signatures; extract embedded images or attachments.
System requirements
Stirling PDF runs as a single Docker container based on a Spring Boot Java application. At idle it uses under 512 MB RAM — meaning it coexists comfortably with other services on a 2 GB VPS. For heavy OCR workloads (large batches of high-resolution scanned pages), plan for 2 GB dedicated RAM to avoid Java heap pressure. CPU usage spikes during conversions but returns to near zero at idle; a 1 vCPU VPS handles typical workloads. No domain is required — the app runs on any IP address on port 8080.
Deploy Stirling PDF on your VPS in four steps
Order a ServOrbit VPS (1 GB RAM minimum)
Any Ubuntu 24.04 plan with 1 GB or more works for standard PDF operations. Choose 2 GB if you plan to run heavy OCR jobs. No domain is required — the app is accessible directly via IP:8080.
One-click install from the marketplace
Open your ServOrbit control panel, go to Marketplace → Collaboration & Productivité → Stirling PDF, and click Deploy. Docker pulls stirlingtools/stirling-pdf:latest and starts the container. The web UI is ready on port 8080 within 20–30 seconds.
Open the web UI and start working
Navigate to http://<your-vps-ip>:8080 in any browser — no login required in the default single-user configuration. Pick an operation from the sidebar (Merge PDFs, Compress, Convert to Word, OCR Text, Add Watermark, etc.), upload your files, and click Process. The result downloads immediately.
Enable login for team use (optional)
If multiple people will use the instance, enable authentication: SSH into your VPS, edit the Docker Compose environment to set SECURITY_ENABLELOGIN=true, and restart the container with docker compose restart. Stirling PDF creates an admin account on first boot — credentials appear in docker compose logs stirling-pdf | grep -i password.
Logging in for the first time
There is NO login at all: the application opens straight onto its PDF tools, with no account and no password. Anyone who knows the address can use it and upload files to it — do not process confidential documents there until authentication has been put in front of it.
OCR for Arabic documents works out of the box
The default stirlingtools/stirling-pdf:latest image bundles Tesseract with Arabic (ara), French (fra) and English (eng) language packs pre-installed. Upload a scanned Arabic-language document, select OCR → Arabic, and get a searchable PDF in seconds — without any additional configuration. This makes Stirling PDF particularly useful for Moroccan administrative workflows where documents are often produced as scans.
Stirling PDF vs SmallPDF vs ILovePDF
SmallPDF and ILovePDF are the dominant cloud PDF tools. Both are fast and polished — and both upload every document to their servers, subject you to rate limits on the free tier, and charge a subscription for unlimited use. Stirling PDF has no rate limits, no subscription, and no data egress. The feature set is comparable (and in some areas deeper — batch operations, OCR, PDF comparison and metadata editing are all included). The trade-off is that you manage the server; on ServOrbit that means clicking Deploy once and leaving it running.
