PDF24 vs Stirling PDF

as AI assistants see them, week of 2026-10-26

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PDF24 and Stirling PDF are neck and neck, each turning up in 19 of 57 answers, with overall scores of 15 and 16 out of 100. They just split differently: PDF24 is named in every answer for "best free PDF editor" (4 of 4) and "best tool without a subscription" (2 of 2), while Stirling PDF owns the privacy angle, named in 3 of 3 answers on sensitive documents and 2 of 2 on open-source or self-hosted tools. Head-to-head, Stirling edges ahead in 7 questions, PDF24 in 6, and they tie in 12. Neither gets mentioned for form-filling or table extraction.

Head to head

metric	PDF24	Stirling PDF
score	15	16
questions won	13	16

By assistant

PDF24

assistant	score	named in, this week	usual spot, this week
ChatGPT	19	25% of answers	#3.6
Claude	15	30% of answers	#5.8
Gemini	not sampled this week
Perplexity	not sampled this week

Stirling PDF

assistant	score	named in, this week	usual spot, this week
ChatGPT	6	10% of answers	#2.0
Claude	31	60% of answers	#6.2
Gemini	not sampled this week
Perplexity	not sampled this week

Where they differ

Only PDF24 gets named for

What's the best tool to redact or remove sensitive text from a PDF?
What's the best tool to compress a large PDF?
What's the best tool to convert a PDF to Word or Excel?

Only Stirling PDF gets named for

What's the best open-source or self-hosted PDF tool?
What's the best OCR tool to make a scanned PDF searchable?
What's the best tool to merge, split and reorder PDF pages?
What are the best alternatives to Adobe Acrobat?
What are the best alternatives to Foxit?
What's the best alternative to Adobe Acrobat?

More comparisons

Not sold on either?

Scores count how often each assistant names a product, weighted by position. How the score works · Full PDF editors leaderboard