DocuSmartly VS ShellNewHandler

DocuSmartly's answer

Most online PDF tools upload your file to a server to do the work. DocuSmartly does the opposite wherever it can: signing, splitting, merging, compressing, extracting pages and images-to-PDF all run inside your browser using client-side JavaScript, so the file never leaves your computer. Only conversions that genuinely need a document engine — Word/Excel/PowerPoint to PDF, PDF to Word — and AI extraction go to a server, and we say so plainly instead of hiding it.

The second difference is focus. Alongside the usual PDF tools there are workflows built for real Indian paperwork: compressing to an exact size limit for exam portals, self-attesting documents, and a form auto-fill that remembers your details once and completes any PDF form.

DocuSmartly's answer

Primarily India. Students and job applicants dealing with exam-portal and government-form uploads that reject files over a fixed size, people who need documents self-attested or signed without a printer, and small business owners and freelancers handling invoices, rent agreements and vendor forms.

Beyond that, anyone who does not want to upload a personal document — an ID, a contract, a bank statement — to someone else's server just to sign or split it.

DocuSmartly's answer

Frontend: vanilla JavaScript, no framework. pdf-lib for all client-side PDF manipulation, Tesseract compiled to WebAssembly for in-browser OCR, JSZip for multi-file output.

Backend: Python 3.11 and Flask, with PyMuPDF and pdf2docx for high-fidelity PDF-to-Word, python-docx and openpyxl for document generation, OCRmyPDF and Ghostscript for scanned PDFs, LibreOffice for Office-to-PDF conversion, and qpdf for encryption.

Infrastructure: Docker on Railway, PostgreSQL, Razorpay for payments, Google Sign-In for auth.

DocuSmartly's answer

For nine years I worked a corporate job — long hours, and by 2025 I wasn't happy in it. A difficult stretch at work became the push I needed, and I started teaching myself to code.

DocuSmartly was meant to be a practice project. Nothing more. But as I built it I kept running into how much friction sits inside ordinary paperwork — a portal that rejects your form because the file is 40 KB too large, a document that needs signing when you don't own a printer. Somewhere along the way it stopped being an exercise and started being something that could genuinely make someone's day easier.

That is why there is a feedback button on every page. I am one person building this, and what users report actually changes the product — one bug report revealed that PowerPoint and Excel conversions had been silently broken in production, and it was fixed because someone took the time to tell me.

I would like DocuSmartly to become the PDF tool people reach for first. If you use it and something annoys you, tell me. That is how it gets there.

DocuSmartly's answer

DocuSmartly is used by individuals, not sold to organisations, so there is no customer list to publish here.

Most of the tools work without an account at all — no sign-up, no email. That is deliberate, and it means there is no name attached to the work someone does on the site. A list of "biggest customers" would run against the whole point of building it this way.

DocuSmartly's answer

Three practical reasons.

No account, no watermark, no daily task limit on the everyday tools — compress, merge, split, sign. You open the page and use it.

Privacy you can verify. For the client-side tools you can open your browser's network tab and watch that your file is never uploaded. That is a stronger guarantee than a privacy policy promising files are "deleted after an hour".

Tools the others do not have: a PDF form auto-fill that stores your details once and matches them to any form's fields, compression to an exact target size for portal upload limits, and a Smart Auto-Split that finds document boundaries in a scanned stack automatically.