Convert Magic vs DocFly: Which PDF Tool Is Actually Free?

DocFly (the rebrand of pdfPro) markets itself as a free PDF editor and converter. Click around for two minutes and you'll find the small print: free users get 3 conversions per hour, every edited document is watermarked unless you upgrade, and unlocking the full feature set costs $9.99/month on a yearly plan. The "free" label is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Short answer: DocFly has a polished PDF editor that's genuinely useful — but their free tier exists mainly to get you onto a paid plan. Convert Magic is actually free, with no per-hour caps, no watermarks, and no upload to a server.

Quick Verdict

Feature	Convert Magic	DocFly
Price	Free forever	Free with limits / $9.99–14.99/month
Hourly conversions (free)	Unlimited ✅	3 per hour ❌
Watermark on output?	No ✅	Yes (free tier) ❌
Account required?	No ✅	Yes — email + password ❌
Upload required?	No ✅	Yes ❌
Processing location	Your browser ✅	DocFly servers ❌
Average speed (10MB PDF→Word)	2.4 seconds ✅	11.8 seconds ❌
PDF editor	Basic	Full WYSIWYG editor ✅
File deletion	Never uploaded ✅	After 24 hours (free)

Speed Comparison: Real Tests

Same test as our other comparisons: a 10.4MB PDF, converted to Word, five runs each.

Convert Magic:

Run 1: 2.4 seconds
Run 2: 2.3 seconds
Run 3: 2.5 seconds
Run 4: 2.2 seconds
Run 5: 2.6 seconds
Average: 2.4 seconds ✅

DocFly:

Run 1: 12.3 seconds
Run 2: 10.9 seconds
Run 3: 11.8 seconds
Run 4: 12.4 seconds
Run 5: 11.6 seconds
Average: 11.8 seconds ❌

Roughly 4.9x slower, and that's before you hit the 3-per-hour limit on the fourth file.

The Free Tier Reality Check: 3 Files an Hour, With Watermarks

DocFly's free tier looks generous at a glance: "free PDF conversion and editing!" Then you actually try to use it for real work and the constraints stack up:

3 conversions per hour. Need to convert 10 invoices? Plan to spend 3+ hours, or pay.
Watermarks on edited PDFs. If you use the editor (signing, adding text, redacting), the free output gets a "Made with DocFly" watermark unless you upgrade.
Account required even for the free tier. You can't just drop a file and download — you have to register first.
Upgrade prompts on almost every action. The UI is built to funnel you toward the $9.99/month plan.

To DocFly's credit, they're not as deceptive as some competitors — the limits are eventually disclosed. But "3 files per hour with a watermark and a forced signup" is not what most people mean by "free."

Convert Magic doesn't have hourly limits, doesn't watermark anything, doesn't require an account, and doesn't have an upgrade modal because there isn't a paid plan to upgrade to.

Privacy: Where Your File Goes

DocFly uploads every file you convert or edit to its servers, processes it there, and (according to their privacy policy) deletes free-tier files after 24 hours.

That's a standard model for SaaS converters, and for blog drafts or recipe PDFs it's fine. For everything else, the question is whether you're comfortable putting a copy of that file on a third-party server for 24 hours, indexed against an email address and (if you paid) a billing record.

Convert Magic uses WebAssembly to do the conversion inside your browser. There is no upload step. No file copy on a third-party disk, no 24-hour retention window, no account record tying the file to your identity.

Feature Deep-Dive

PDF Editing

This is DocFly's actual strength. Their PDF editor is one of the better web-based ones: you can add and edit text directly on pages, sign documents, redact, annotate, and reorganize pages with a clean drag-and-drop interface. If your workflow is "open a PDF and visually edit it like a Word doc," DocFly's editor is meaningfully better than Convert Magic's editing tools.

Convert Magic is conversion-first. We do basic editing (merging, splitting, rotating, password protection, OCR) but we're not building a full WYSIWYG PDF editor. If editing is the main job, DocFly's paid tier or Adobe Acrobat is the right answer.

Conversion Quality

For PDF↔Word, PDF↔Excel, image conversions — both produce similar output quality. We've tested DocFly's conversion fidelity against ours on text-heavy documents, tables, and scanned PDFs (OCR). The output is broadly comparable. Where Convert Magic pulls ahead is on speed and on running without an internet connection (after the first page load).

Pricing

DocFly's plans run $9.99/month (annual) or $14.99/month (monthly), with a 7-day trial. Watermark removal, unlimited conversions, and password protection are paywalled.

Convert Magic charges only for AI background removal credits (which use a paid model under the hood). Every other tool — PDF conversion, image conversion, compression, OCR, merging, splitting, password protection — is free with no usage limit.

When to Choose Each

Choose DocFly if:

You need a polished WYSIWYG PDF editor (and are willing to pay $9.99+/month)
You sign and annotate PDFs all day and want a single tool for it
The 3-per-hour cap doesn't apply to your work pattern

Choose Convert Magic if:

You need actual unlimited free conversions, not "free until you hit the cap"
Files contain anything sensitive — tax docs, contracts, medical records, NDAs
You don't want to create an account just to convert a PDF
You don't want a watermark on the output
You care about speed (2.4s vs 11.8s)

Conclusion

DocFly has a real product — their PDF editor is good — but they call themselves free in a way that requires reading the fine print. If you need full editing power, they're a reasonable $9.99/month choice. If you mostly need to convert files, Convert Magic does it 5x faster, with no limits, no watermark, and no upload.

Try it: Convert PDF to Word · Merge PDFs · Compress PDFs

Convert Magic vs DocFly: No 3-File Limit, No Paywall (2026)