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Apryse and ComPDF both provide PDF SDKs for viewing, annotating, and processing documents, but they differ significantly in architecture and scope. Apryse uses a proprietary rendering engine built over 20 years, supports native DOCX and Excel editing without conversion, and processes everything client-side for compliance-sensitive workflows. ComPDF offers a lightweight PDF SDK with core features like viewing, annotation, and form filling. This page compares both SDKs across rendering quality, format support, AIpowered extraction, compliance, and developer experience to help you choose the right fit for your application.
Quick Comparison
Company
600+ global employees with localized support
Part of KDAN Mobile, 200+ global employees
Technology
One unified SDK that can be expressed cross-platform
Proprietary fork of PDFium with add-ons for various features
Viewing
Powerful client-side rendering with a deep feature set. Source available UI that’s deeply customizable
Client-side rendering, UI customizable via APIs but not source available
Format Breadth
100+ Formats
21, but possibly more that are not readily documented
AI / ML Workflows
Smart Data Extraction, OCR, ICR, and extensible viewer
ComIDP, OCR, MCP Server
Security
SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, annual pen testing
ISO 27001 (via parent company), no published SOC 2
WCAG Compliance
WCAG 2.2 AA compliant
No published WCAG compliance
Trusted by Leaders
Join the ranks of over 20,000 innovative start-ups, governments and Fortune 500 companies - including more than 85% of Fortune 100 companies that trust Apryse
ComPDF is powered by PDFium
PDFium is an open-source rendering engine built by Foxit/Google, launched via Google/Chromium, and adopted by many vendors. PDFium is battle-tested across billions of users and is a great base rendering engine; however, Apryse customers access support directly from the engineers who built the parsing engine, which is continuously being improved and tailored for real enterprise use cases.
SecurityÂ
SOC 2
SOC 2 Type II
Not published
ISO 27001
Since 2018
Via parent KDAN (2023)
Pen testing
Annual third-party
Not documented
Client-side processing
Files render client-side
Files render client-side
GDPR
Compliant
Compliant with DPA (via KDAN)
Server-Side Processing Comparison
Viewing
PDF, Office, CAD, images, email, and more. High fidelity rendering of complex layouts, embedded fonts, and layers
PDF, Office, and images primarily. High fidelity rendering
Language localization
Built-in language localization for 30 languages OOTB, with support for RTL languages
Localization supported, but language coverage not specified
UI customization
Source available frontend customizable via modular UI config, or fork and rebuild. Extensible and fully customizable
Customizable only via exposed APIs, closed source frontend
UI accessibility
WCAG 2.2 AA compliant. Screen reader support, keyboard navigation, appropriate contrasting
No published WCAG compliance
Annotations
30+ types: highlights, stamps, markup, measurement, and more
12 types prebuilt
Search
Advanced full-text search with regex
Full-text search
Forms
AcroForms + XFA. Live form field customization
AcroForms, XFA not confirmed
Digital Signatures
PAdES (B-B through B-LTA), LTV, PKCS#7, CMS, TSA integration, Long-term validation
No published PAdES or LTV documentation. Verify advanced signing profiles first
Measurements
6 measurement types, snap-to-point, calibration. Purpose-built for AEC workflows
Basic measurement support
Redaction
Pattern search + redact. Permanently redact underlying text and images
Permanently remove text and images
PDF Editing
Live editing of PDF text and images
Edit PDF text and images
DOCX Editing
Native editing of OOXML. File format preserved with no intermediary (e.g. JSON or HTML file) conversion
Not available
XLSX Editing
In-browser XLSX editing with formulas and charts
Not available
OCR
Modified versions of Tesseract and IRIS
AI-powered OCR
ICR
Proprietary ICR engine for handwritten text recognition
No ICR engine, suggests using their OCR model instead
Key-value pair extraction
Smart Data Extraction: on-prem ML model, extract as JSON
ComIDP: separate cloud-only offering
Tabular data extraction
Smart Data Extraction: detect and extract structured content from PDFs
ComIDP: detect and extract tables, also available via their OCR
Document classification
Smart Data Extraction: page-level classification with confidence scores across 19 document types
ComIDP: standard business document type classification
Barcode extraction
1D and 2D barcode detection (QR, Code 128, UPC, Data Matrix, and more)
Not available
Document generation
JSON-to-PDF template generation. Also available via Fluent for Office templates
Not available
Office conversion
High accuracy for complex layouts, tables, charts, conditional formatting, and all other XML data
Claims AI-powered layout analysis
CAD conversion
DWG, DXF, DGN, RVT, DWF
Not available
Email conversion
MSG, EML
Not available
HTML to PDF
Available via HTML2PDF component or iText
Available via API, not a self-deployed feature
PDF/A
All profiles (1A/1B through 4). Validation and conformance checking
PDF/A conversion supported, but profile coverage lacks documentation
Auto-tagging
Automatic structure tagging for PDF/UA compliance. Reduces or fixes manual accessibility remediation
Not available
Page comparison
Visual side-by-side, overlay, semantic text diff, and pixel-level comparison
Semantic text diff
PDF optimization
Best-in-class reduction of PDF for optimized storage and viewing
PDF compression available
PDF sanitization
One-call API removes metadata, scripts, hidden content, and embedded files from a PDF. Fully self-deployed
Not available
When to Choose ComPDF
STARTUP OR PRE-REVENUE PRICING
Startup or pre-revenue pricing
ComPDF has a great community license program targeting startups and individual developers (5 or fewer on a team)
CLOUD DATA EXTRACTION
MULTILINGUAL OCR
BASIC PDF VIEWING AND ANNOTATION
When to Choose Apryse
DEEP USER INTERACTION
Deep user interaction
Deeper feature sets around viewing, annotations, form filling, digital signatures, editing, and collaboration in general
OFFICE EDITING
COMPLIANCE SENSITIVE INDUSTRIES
ON-PREMISE DATA EXTRACTION
What Our Customers Say
"The speed at which they integrate is superior to their competition and their product roadmap has been good -- they’ve invested in the right things."
Marcus O'Brien
Global Head of Product Management, Autodesk
"Apryse SDK [PDFTron] had particularly strong annotation and collaboration features, and their cross-platform approach allowed us to accelerate how we delivered products."
Sam Stuart
Senior Product Manager, Bentley Systems
"Apryse [PDFTron] demonstrated superior speed and functionality out of the box. In contrast, the competition took a lot of shortcuts and it was obvious in the user experience."
Alistair Michener
Founder and CEO, Drawboard
Apryse is the top choice for document processing technology
Backed by a Team of Experts
FAQ
Apryse uses a proprietary core engine built from scratch, covering 100+ document formats with viewing, editing, collaboration, and ML in one SDK. ComPDF is built on Google’s open-source PDFium engine with proprietary extensions for features, focused primarily on PDF workflows.
Only Apryse holds SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and WCAG 2.2 AA. ComPDF is ISO 27001 certified but does not hold SOC 2 Type II or WCAG compliance.
Apryse offers OCR & ICR for character recognition, and Smart Data Extraction for document classification and ML-trained extraction, outputting data in AI ready formats. ComPDF offers OCR and intelligent document parsing / extraction, which use a productized LLM hook to enhance performance and cannot be performed on-prem.
No, only Apryse offers client-side native DOCX editing. ComPDF offers DOCX to PDF conversion for PDF viewing.
