KeptPDF VS Liminary

KeptPDF's answer

KeptPDF runs entirely in your browser. Your file, and the text inside it, never leaves your device. Not to an AI, not even to us. You can open your browser's network tab and watch: the document bytes never go out.

Most online PDF tools upload your file to a server first, and some "AI redaction" services quietly send your document text to a third-party model. That is the exact risk people are trying to avoid when they redact something.

KeptPDF also does true redaction. The text is removed from the file, not covered with a black box you can copy out later. Every redaction produces a verification certificate you can share with the file.

Liminary's answer:

Liminary is the only tool that covers save, organize, recall, and create in one AI-native workflow. Most tools handle one piece: bookmark managers save links, note apps organize, AI chatbots generate. But none of them connect your actual saved research to what you produce. Liminary does. It ingests anything (articles, PDFs, videos, AI conversations), then proactively surfaces the right knowledge when you need it, without you searching. It also fact-checks your outputs against your sources and flags gaps in your research, something no other tool in this space does.

KeptPDF's answer

Three reasons.

Privacy you can verify, not just a promise. Processing happens locally in the browser, so there is no upload step to trust. We do send anonymous usage counts for quota, and we say so plainly, but never your document.

Real redaction with proof. Removed text is permanently gone, and you get a certificate showing the file was checked for leftover extractable text. Automated detection cannot catch everything, so a final human review is still your job, and the tool says that too.

It works on a phone. Most PDF suites assume a desktop. KeptPDF was built and used on a phone first, so redacting a document while you are standing in a hallway actually works.

Liminary's answer:

If you use Feedly or similar tools to monitor industry trends, you can read but not synthesize or create from what you save. If you use Guru or Glean, you get knowledge retrieval for teams, but it's built for internal company knowledge, not the external research consultants gather for client work. If you use ChatGPT or Claude alone, you get generation but no access to your own saved research, which means hallucinations and no source citations. Liminary connects all of that: capture from anywhere, AI recall with 4x better accuracy than ChatGPT + Google Drive, and creation tools that let you go from research to deliverable without leaving the product.

KeptPDF's answer

Anyone who has to hand a document to someone else and needs the sensitive parts gone first.

In practice that is solo attorneys and small law firms, accountants and tax preparers, healthcare and records staff handling requests, HR teams, and individuals dealing with their own medical, legal, or financial paperwork.

The common thread is not an industry. It is a person who cannot upload a confidential file to a random website, and who does not have an enterprise IT budget to solve it.

Liminary's answer:

Independent consultants, fractional strategists, and small professional services firms (1 to 5 people) who bill for their perspective. These are professionals who synthesize large volumes of research into client deliverables like strategy decks, positioning docs, market analyses, and recommendations. Their work depends on the quality and accuracy of the information they bring to the table.

KeptPDF's answer

The app is plain JavaScript with no front-end framework, which keeps it fast and keeps the code auditable.

PDF work happens in the browser using pdf.js for rendering and pdf-lib for writing. Text recognition uses Tesseract running as WebAssembly. Password and encryption handling uses a WebAssembly build of qpdf. It is a Progressive Web App, so it installs and works offline.

The thin server side is Node on Vercel, with Postgres for accounts, Stripe for billing, and Resend for email. None of those ever see a document.

Liminary's answer:

Liminary is built on an AI-native architecture using semantic ingestion that preserves meaning at sub-document granularity, a context detection engine that predicts what knowledge is relevant to your current work, and an MCP-ready infrastructure that allows integration with other AI tools and agents. Available as a Chrome extension and web app.

KeptPDF's answer

A family member got seriously ill. We spent most days at the hospital, and straight answers were hard to come by, so we leaned on AI tools to make sense of the records, notes, and lab results.

But you cannot paste a medical record into an AI chat. You have to strip the names, the ID numbers, the diagnoses first. And almost every tool we found either wanted to upload the whole file to a server, or "auto-redacted" by sending the document text to an online AI. That was the exact thing we were trying to avoid.

Most of this was happening on a phone, at a bedside. So I built the tool I needed: redaction that runs on the device, works on mobile, and never sends the file anywhere. That turned into KeptPDF, which is now a full PDF suite with over 20 tools, all local-first.

KeptPDF's answer

KeptPDF is early and independent, and we do not publish customer names. The product is privacy-first by design: we never see your documents, and we do not track who our users are or what they work on. Publishing a client list would sit badly next to that.

The user base today is mostly solo attorneys, small firms, accountants, and individuals handling their own records.