Should you switch? The short answer
Switch if you keep running into iLovePDF's task counters, if you do not want to pay $7 a month to compress more than two files, or if you handle documents that should not be uploaded anywhere — contracts, medical records, payslips, anything under NDA. Twenty-four of our thirty-four tools do their work in the browser tab and never transmit the file.
Stay with iLovePDF if you need its desktop or mobile apps, if you want an account that keeps a task history across devices, or if you need the highest-fidelity PDF-to-Word conversion and are willing to pay for it. Those are real advantages and we do not match them.
Disclosure: PaperKit is our tool. Every iLovePDF figure below is quoted from their own pricing and legal pages, linked at the bottom.
The free-tier limits you are hitting
iLovePDF's free tier is not limited by file size so much as by how often you may use it. As published on their pricing page: Compress PDF allows 200 MB but only 2 tasks; Merge PDF allows 100 MB across 25 tasks; Rotate allows 20 tasks; Image to PDF caps at 40 MB and PDF to JPG at 25 MB.
Two whole features are simply switched off for free accounts: OCR — both "PDF to Word (OCR)" and "PDF to Excel (OCR)" are listed as unavailable — and PDF to PDF/A, the archival format people usually need precisely once, under deadline, for a submission portal.
Removing the caps means Premium at $7 per month, or $48 billed annually (about $4 a month). That is a fair price for a tool you use daily. It is a strange price for compressing three PDFs in a year.
PaperKit has no task counter and no account, so there is nothing to meter. What we do have is a practical ceiling in the other direction: browser-based tools are bounded by your device's memory, so a 500 MB scanned PDF may struggle on an old phone where a server-side service would not.
Where your files actually go — the part that needs precision
iLovePDF uploads. Their legal page states it plainly: "Files you upload and process are encrypted and deleted from our servers within 2 hours", and that iLovePDF "does not access, use, analyze or store any processed data". That is a reasonable policy, honestly disclosed. It is still an upload.
PaperKit is split, and we are not going to blur it. Twenty-four tools — merge, split, compress, rotate, organise, crop, watermark, page numbers, sign, redact, protect, unlock, compare, PDF to JPG, JPG to PDF, PDF to text and the rest — run on pdf-lib and pdf.js inside your browser. Open your network tab while you use them: the file never goes anywhere. They keep working with your connection switched off after the page loads.
Ten tools cannot work that way. PDF to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, the three reverse Office conversions, OCR, PDF/A, Repair and URL-to-PDF need LibreOffice, an OCR engine or a real browser — none of which fit in a tab. Those stream through our server and are never written to disk, but they are uploads, and each of those pages says so on its own page rather than hiding it here.
So the accurate version of the privacy claim is: for most of what people do with PDFs, PaperKit does not transmit the file at all; for the hard conversions, both services upload, and the difference narrows to what happens afterwards.
Where iLovePDF is genuinely better
Conversion fidelity. Server-side LibreOffice and commercial PDF engines produce different results, and for a heavily formatted PDF to Word conversion iLovePDF's output is often cleaner than ours. If the document is a legal contract whose layout must survive intact, test both before committing.
Apps and continuity. iLovePDF ships desktop and mobile apps and an account that carries your work between them. PaperKit is a website with no account, which means nothing to sync and also nothing to come back to.
Very large files on weak hardware. Because their processing happens on a server, a 300 MB scan is their server's problem. On PaperKit it is your laptop's problem, and on a low-memory device that is a real difference.
How to switch
There is nothing to migrate — no account, no stored files, no export step. Bookmark the tool you use most and carry on.
The most common starting points are merging, splitting and compressing; all three are linked below. If you arrived here because you hit the two-task compression limit, that is the one to try first.