Best Tools gathers a handful of everyday utilities: merging and splitting PDFs, cropping images, checking PNG transparency, converting Markdown to Word, opening .md files, computing MD5, formatting JSON, generating random passwords, and trimming clips out of a video. What they have in common is that each job is small and one-off — not worth installing a desktop app for, yet searching for one every time means picking through sites that want an account, cap your usage, or stamp a watermark on the result. This site simply keeps them in one place, ready to use.
The usual online tool uploads your file to a server, processes it there, and sends it back. For a contract, a scanned ID, a bank statement or an unpublished document, that step is itself the risk: how long the file sat on whose machine, whether a copy was kept, whether it was used for anything else — none of it is something you can verify. And these jobs — merging PDFs, cropping an image, computing a hash, formatting some JSON — are well within what a browser can do today. Uploading only hands the operator one more copy of your file.
So everything here stays local: the processing logic lives entirely in the front end, there is no backend, and therefore nowhere a file could be stored. Third-party libraries are self-hosted too, so pages make no requests to public CDNs. Exactly what each tool does, and which single one is the exception, is spelled out in the Privacy Policy.
There are no accounts, so there is no login, no free tier and no "2 conversions left today". You never register an email for a single conversion, and nothing gets watermarked or padded with an ad page on the way out. No ads, no third-party tracking scripts, no paid tier carved out of the features. The tools are plain static pages — bookmarking one link is all it takes.
Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript — no front-end framework and no backend. Each tool is a self-contained page that loads only what it needs, so it opens fast and keeps working if you go offline after the page has loaded. Chinese is the source language; the English, Japanese, Traditional Chinese and Russian versions are produced at build time from dictionaries, rather than several sets of pages maintained by hand.
One self-imposed rule guides the technical choices: anything that can be finished in the browser does not go to a server, and where that genuinely is not possible — currently only video trimming, which has to fetch remote data — how it works gets written down plainly instead of glossed over.
This is a personal project, built and maintained by one person in their spare time, out of the tools they kept needing and kept having to search for. There is no company, no team and no business plan — which means the pace of updates depends on spare time, but equally that there is no pressure to eventually monetise anyone's data.
Questions, bugs, or a tool you wish were here — write to [email protected]. Which tools people actually use is the main thing that decides what gets built next.
Running locally is not free of cost. Processing power is whatever your device has, so very large files are slower than a server would be, and a few-hundred-megabyte PDF may struggle on an older phone. The range of formats and codecs available in a browser is narrower too, so an unusual format gets an honest "not supported" rather than a broken conversion. We think the trade is worth making — but if your job really is batch-processing large files, dedicated desktop software fits better, and there is no reason to force it here.