Search "compress PDF" and the same three names come up every time. They differ on the day you actually need them.
Three mistakes people make
Picking a preset and hoping
Smallpdf offers "basic" or "strong" and nothing in between. Strong can turn a scanned certificate into a smudge, with no way to just say "get it under 5 MB".
Not knowing the daily limit until you hit it
Smallpdf allows two tasks a day across the whole site. Compress once and merge once and you are locked out until tomorrow, which is a bad surprise before a deadline.
Buying Acrobat just to shrink a file
Adobe Acrobat Standard costs about £14 a month and Pro about £20, and both are full editors with forms and e-signatures. Buying it to compress the odd PDF is paying for far more than the job needs.
The fix: name the size, skip the presets
The Jobbit PDF compressor asks for the target size instead of a preset, under 1, 2, 5 or 10 MB, then checks a page of the result before handing it back with the size before and after. There is no daily task counter. The full comparison scores six tools on limits, quality, speed and price.
How the free options compare
| Tool | Free limit | Paid price |
|---|---|---|
| Smallpdf | Two tasks a day | Pro $15 a month or $108 a year |
| iLovePDF | More tasks, file-size caps | Premium about $4 to $9 a month |
| Jobbit | Free plan credits, no daily cap | Plus £15 a month for heavier use |
A builder's weekly paperwork
A builder submits scanned certificates and quotes to different council and supplier portals every week, each with a different upload limit. Free-site limits meant waiting a day between jobs; on Jobbit he names the size each portal wants, gets the file back checked and readable, and gets on with the next job.
When to pay instead
For legally evidenced signatures with an audit trail, Acrobat or DocuSign is the right tool, not a compressor. If you need to work fully offline, PDF24's free desktop app or Sejda's paid desktop app keep files on your machine.
