A name, an account number, a signature, a photo you need gone before you share a document.
Drag a box over each thing to remove — on as many pages as you need — and press Redact. The marked areas are cut out of the file itself, not covered up, so there is nothing left underneath for anyone to select, copy or extract.
By ShinobiTools Team · Last updated: August 2026
This actually deletes the content — it does not paint over it. A black box drawn by most tools (and most PDF viewers' own markup) leaves the original text sitting right underneath it — still selectable, copyable, and recoverable with a simple select-all. This tool turns every page you mark into a flat image with the black box burned into the pixels, so nothing of the original text, images or hidden layers is left on that page. Pages you do not mark stay exactly as they were. Your file is only ever handled in memory here, never written to our disk.
A PDF page is really two things layered together: the marks you see, and the underlying content — text runs, image data — that produced them. Drawing a black rectangle only adds a new mark on top; the content underneath is completely untouched and comes straight back out with copy-paste, "select all", or any text-extraction tool.
This tool does not draw on top: every page with a box on it is rendered to an image at 200 dpi with the black fill burned into the pixels. What you download has nothing left to recover in the marked areas, on any page.
PDF redaction here means the content is cut out, not covered up. You mark the areas in your browser tab and the redaction itself runs on our own server, so you can redact a PDF online free of charge, with no watermark on the result.
It is a free PDF redact tool, with no account and no daily cap, and it works the same on a phone as on a desktop, since you do it all from the browser tab while the file is processed on our own server and not kept.
Blurring and pixelating are cosmetic filters applied to the existing pixels — several published cases have shown text recovered from a blurred image by reversing the filter. A solid black fill after the underlying content is removed leaves nothing to reverse: there is no blurred version of the text left anywhere in the file to work backwards from.
Here it takes three steps: mark the area, remove the content, then draw the black box.
No paid tier that gates the removal step exists here. If you have a stack of documents, run each one through in turn; there is no cap on how many you do in a day. Every file is processed in memory only and never written to disk, which is the standard any real PDF redaction tool should meet.
Looking to undo a redaction instead — pull the covered content back out from a PDF someone else marked? That's not something this tool, or a genuine redaction tool of any kind, can do: proper redaction cuts the content out of the file entirely rather than hiding it, the same way this page's own black boxes work, so there is nothing left underneath to recover. If what you actually have is a black box drawn by a lesser tool with the text still sitting underneath it, that's a different, accidental case — not something we'll help undo either.
Your PDF is processed entirely in memory on our own machine and handed back in the response — it is never written to our disk for this tool, and nothing is kept afterwards.
Only need the metadata gone — author name, title, the hidden XMP copy? Remove PDF metadata does just that. Redacting a form you filled in? Flatten PDF bakes the field values in first so they can't be edited back out. Need the whole page trimmed instead of a specific area removed? Crop PDF handles margins. Handed two drafts of the same document and need to know exactly what changed before you decide what to redact? Compare PDF lines up the two versions and names every changed word. Just want to flag something for a colleague to look at, not cut it out for good? Annotate PDF highlights or notes it while leaving the content underneath untouched.
This tool works differently: every page with a box on it is rendered to an image at 200 dpi, the black box is burned into those pixels, and the page is replaced by that one image. Text, vector drawings, hidden layers, form fields and comments on that page are gone from the file; only link annotations are kept. There is nothing left to cut around, so nothing can slip through. The price: on a page you redact, the rest of the text is no longer selectable or searchable either, and the page takes a little more space. Pages without a box stay exactly as they were, text and all.
Drop the PDF in, drag a box over each thing you want gone on any page, then press Redact. The download has those areas cut out of the file itself. That is all there is to how to redact a PDF here, and how to redact on PDF pages with several boxes works the same way: draw them all, then press Redact once.
It deletes it. Drawing a black rectangle over text leaves the original text sitting underneath, still selectable, copyable and recoverable with any PDF tool or a simple select-all. Here the whole marked page is replaced by an image with the black box burned in, so there is no text left underneath at all and the box sits on empty space. You get a redacted PDF meaning exactly that: the content is gone, not covered.
Yes. Drag as many boxes as you need, on any page, then press Redact once to apply all of them. So how to redact PDF document pages in one pass is simple: box everything you want gone, then redact a PDF document once instead of page by page.
No, visually it is the same solid black rectangle. The difference is invisible until someone tries to select or extract the text: with this tool there is nothing left to select.
On a page you put a box on, a little: that page becomes one image at 200 dpi, so it still looks the same but its text is no longer selectable or searchable. Pages without a box are not touched and keep their text.
Use real redaction, not a drawn shape. A black or white box drawn in your PDF viewer, or text deleted in an editor, can leave the words in the file. How to redact information on PDF pages safely, and how to black out text in PDF files so it can't be selected afterwards, both come down to the same thing. To delete text from PDF pages for good, mark it here and press Redact, and the page is replaced by an image without it.
If you want to know how to erase text in PDF files so nobody can recover it, mark it and press Redact; the words are removed from the page data, not painted over. To redact text and images together, for example the photo and number on an ID card, drag a box over each one and both disappear the same way. If you need a correction rather than a removal, edit the source document and export a new PDF file instead, because nothing here can erase one word and type another in its place.
Blurring can be reversed, and blurred text has been recovered before. A deleted-and-boxed area has nothing left to recover.
Cropping hides the page edges by moving the visible boundary, but the content is still in the file. Redacting a PDF cuts the marked content out of the file's data entirely, so it is gone from that area.
25 pages and 250 MB per file on the free tier; a €5 pass raises that to 200 pages and 500 MB. There is no account, no watermark and no daily cap.
No. Your file goes to our own machine, is processed in memory and is never written to disk, so it does not sit on a third-party cloud server at any point. The redacted PDF comes straight back to your browser.
Yes, that is the most common use here: mark the account number, address or any other line, then press Redact to remove it. A redacted bank statement made this way has that data actually removed, not just covered, before you send it on.
Yes. A scanned page is already an image, and the black box is burned into it the same way as on any other page.
Some paid editors have one, but the free markup tools in most viewers only draw a shape on top of the content. This page marks and permanently cuts out the area in one pass, with no separate app.
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