ShellNewHandler VS DocuSmartly

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.