PDFGrid VS GitHub Surf

PDFGrid's answer

PDFGrid runs entirely in your browser — no upload, no server, nothing to install — and it extracts by explicit rules rather than prediction, so the same document always returns the same values.

Most tools do one or the other. Desktop applications run locally but need installing and administrator rights. Cloud services need your documents. AI extraction tools produce a different answer on a different day and give you a confidence score instead of a reason.

PDFGrid is a rule engine you can open in a tab on a locked-down machine, and whose output you can check afterwards because there is nothing probabilistic in it.

PDFGrid's answer

Choose it when your documents are text-based PDFs in recurring formats, you need the same handful of fields out of a lot of files, and you'd rather define the rules yourself than trust a model's judgement about which number was the total.

And choose it when your organisation can't send client documents to a third party at all — a constraint that rules out most of the market before accuracy is even discussed.

Practically: nothing to install, no account needed to try it, a template you build once and reuse, and every extracted value visible before you export.

PDFGrid's answer

People who receive the same kind of document over and over and need a few fields from each one in a spreadsheet — bookkeepers, accountants, accounts-payable and operations staff, logistics coordinators.

Usually not developers. There's no code, no API and nothing to install.

Usually small teams or sole practitioners rather than enterprises with a document ingestion platform. If you already have a pipeline, PDFGrid isn't trying to replace it.

And often people who can't use cloud extraction at all, because of client confidentiality or an internal policy that settles the question before anyone looks at features.

PDFGrid's answer

I needed the same handful of fields out of a lot of similar PDFs, and everything I looked at fell into one of two groups.

The hosted tools wanted the documents on their servers, which isn't an option for a lot of the documents people actually have. The ones that ran locally were either developer libraries — write a parser, then maintain it forever — or they assumed every document was laid out identically, which stops being true on about the fourth file.

So I built the thing I wanted. Draw the fields on one document, save it as a template, apply it to the rest, check the results, export. It runs in the browser because that was the only way to do it without asking anyone to install software or trust me with their files.

Built and maintained by one person in the UK.

PDFGrid's answer

• TypeScript and React, built with Next.js and deployed as a static site
• PDF.js for rendering documents in the browser
• PDFium compiled to WebAssembly for text and geometry extraction, running on the user's own machine
• ExcelJS for generating spreadsheets client-side
• Supabase for authentication and saved templates — the only server-side component, and it never receives document contents
• Cloudflare Pages for hosting