Smallpdf VS StripHTML

StripHTML's answer:

Mostly what it leaves out. There's no signup, no account, no pro tier and no daily limit. You paste your text, press a button and get the result.

The tools don't use AI either. Everything is plain, carefully written string processing, so the same input always gives the same output. Nothing gets queued or rate limited, and there's no API bill that would one day turn into a paywall.

Almost every tool runs entirely in your browser, so your text never leaves your machine. That matters when you're cleaning up a contract, a customer list or anything else that is nobody else's business.

And the details are handled properly. Removing an em dash sounds trivial until you realise the spacing around it has to be rebuilt, or you end up with a stray comma or two words glued together. Fifteen years of edge cases sent in by users have gone into getting small things like that right.

StripHTML's answer:

Because it gets out of your way. Plenty of text tools want your email address before they'll show a result, or cap you at a few uses a day before offering a subscription. StripHTML doesn't do any of that, and never has.

• It's fast. One text box, one button, instant result.
• It's private. Most tools run in your browser, so your text stays on your machine.
• It's predictable. No AI guesswork. The same input gives the same output every time.
• It's been around. The site has run since 2011 and isn't going anywhere.

It also covers a lot of ground in one place. Whether you need to strip HTML, count characters, clean up ChatGPT output or remove tracking from a link, the tool is probably already there. If it isn't, you can write in and there's a good chance it will be soon.

StripHTML's answer:

Anyone who moves text from one place to another and wants it to arrive clean.

In practice that's a broad group:

• Writers and editors cleaning up copy pasted from Word, Google Docs or the web.
• Marketers and social media managers formatting posts for LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook, and checking character limits.
• Developers who need to strip tags, escape strings, encode Base64 or convert timestamps without opening an editor.
• Students and researchers tidying up quotes, sources and transcripts.
• Anyone using AI assistants who wants to remove em dashes, citation markers and leftover Markdown before the text goes anywhere else.

What they have in common is that they have a small, specific problem and want it solved in seconds. Most visitors don't think of themselves as users of a text tool at all. They just have messy text and a deadline.

StripHTML's answer:

It started in 2011, during my parental leave. Between feeds and naps I kept running into the same small irritation. I needed to strip HTML from a bit of text, and every option was heavier than the job deserved: open an editor, find the right regex, run it, close it again. That's a lot of work for something that should take three seconds.

So I built the tool I wanted. One text box, one button, plain text back. It turned out a lot of people were searching for exactly that, and the page found an audience almost straight away.

Then people started asking for the jobs next door, like counting characters, converting case and removing line breaks. The site has grown the same way ever since. Someone runs into a small text problem, writes in about it, and a few weeks later there's a page for it.

Fifteen years on, it's still one developer, no investors and no roadmap. Just dozens of tools, built by hand.

StripHTML's answer:

Deliberately simple ones. The site is built with plain PHP, vanilla JavaScript and hand-written CSS. There are no frameworks, no build step and no heavy libraries, which keeps pages small and fast to load.

The actual text processing is written by hand in JavaScript and runs directly in the browser for almost every tool. That means your text never has to travel to a server, and results appear instantly. The one exception is the original Strip HTML tool on the front page, which processes text on the server, in memory, and never stores it.

There's no AI model behind any of the tools. Everything is deterministic string handling, so the same input always gives the same result, and there's no external API that could slow things down or go away.

PHP handles the page templates, shared layout and tool catalogue. The rest is just careful code and fifteen years of edge cases.

StripHTML's answer:

StripHTML has no accounts or signups, so there's no customer list to share. Regular users include:

• Content and marketing teams
• Copywriters and editors
• Developers and QA testers
• Social media managers
• Support teams cleaning up email replies
• Students and teachers