// septim labs · free tool · pdf redactor

Redact PDFs without uploading them anywhere.

Black boxes, then a clean PDF. Done in your browser. Your file never touches a server — not ours, not anyone's.

nothing uploaded  ·  no account  ·  no email  ·  text under redactions is unselectable in the output

PDF
Drop a PDF here, or click to browse
Stays in your browser tab. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Loading PDF…
//
page 1 of 1
// drag to draw a redaction box  ·  click an existing box to delete it  ·  boxes are per-page
// redaction boxes on this page
No boxes yet — drag on the page above to draw one.
Processing page 0 of 0…
// why "client-side only" matters

Adobe, ilovepdf, and smallpdf all upload your file.

Every mainstream redaction tool sends your PDF to a server to process it. That means your file — with the sensitive information you're trying to black out — is transmitted over the internet to a machine you don't control, processed by software you can't audit, and potentially retained by a company whose privacy policy you haven't read.

This tool renders your PDF using PDF.js (Mozilla's open-source renderer, loaded from jsDelivr CDN), lets you draw boxes on a canvas overlay in your own browser, then uses pdf-lib to rebuild each page as a flattened bitmap with the black boxes burned in. The output file is assembled in your browser's memory and handed to you as a download. No bytes leave your machine.

The burned-in guarantee: in the output PDF, each page is a rasterized image. There is no text layer. The redacted content cannot be selected, copied, extracted, or recovered by any PDF viewer — because it doesn't exist in the file as text anymore.

// verify it yourself

After downloading the redacted PDF, open it in any PDF reader and try to select text under the black boxes. You will get nothing — the text was replaced by pixels, not hidden behind a black overlay. Open DevTools before you drop a file and watch the Network tab: zero uploads fire at any point during this tool's operation.

// if you handle sensitive files regularly

Most teams redacting PDFs are also storing API keys, passwords, recovery phrases, and access tokens in plain-text Notion docs or shared Slack channels. Septim Vault is an offline-first, AES-256-GCM-encrypted secrets manager that runs entirely in your browser. No server. No login. Export your encrypted file to any cloud backup. $29 once.

Septim Vault — $29 →