Stamp a watermark across a PDF

Marking a document DRAFT or CONFIDENTIAL before it circulates is a small thing that prevents a large class of misunderstanding.

Add text or your own PNG or JPG logo, set the opacity and angle, and choose whether it sits behind or over the content. There's a certain irony in most free watermark tools adding their own watermark to the output; this one doesn't.

Placing it behind the content keeps the document readable, which is what you want for DRAFT or a company logo. Placing it over the top at low opacity is harder to ignore, which is what you want for CONFIDENTIAL or DO NOT COPY. You can also restrict it to particular pages, so a cover sheet stays clean while the body is marked.

As with page numbers, the mark is drawn into the page content rather than attached as an annotation, so it survives printing and can't be clicked away by the recipient's PDF reader.

What this does — and what it doesn't

  • Behind the content only shows where the page isn't painted over: scanned pages and pages with a solid background hide it. Use 'over' for those.
  • Text can be Latin, Greek, Cyrillic or Vietnamese. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Indian scripts and emoji can't be drawn as text here; use a picture of the text as a logo instead.
  • A watermark is decoration, not protection. Anyone with a PDF editor can remove it. If you need to restrict what people can do with the file, use Protect instead — and note that PDF permissions are themselves easily bypassed.

Next steps

Add Page Numbers

Number the pages, with control over position and format.

Protect PDF

Encrypt a PDF with a password, using AES-256 (Acrobat 9 variant).

Flatten PDF

Make filled fields and comments permanent, non-editable content.

Sign PDF

Draw, type, or upload a signature and place it on any page.

Watermark PDF — frequently asked questions

Can I use my own logo?
Yes. Choose a PNG or JPG (other picture types are converted to PNG in your browser), then set its width as a share of the page, plus angle and opacity. It's centred or repeated across the page.
Will you add your own watermark to my file?
No. Nothing is added that you didn't ask for. The output contains your watermark and nothing else.
Can I process many PDFs at once?
Yes. Switch on "Process many files", choose the text and look once, add up to 60 PDFs (300 MB in total), and download the results as one ZIP. Files are done one at a time on your device, each with its own status, and any that fail can be retried. Picture watermarks are single-file only.
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
No. Every operation runs in your browser using JavaScript and WebAssembly — the file never leaves your device. You can verify it: load the page, disconnect from the internet, and the tool still works. There is no upload endpoint to send it to.
Is it really free? What's the catch?
It's free because it costs us almost nothing to run: there's no server doing the work, so there's no per-file cost to recover. No account, no watermark, no daily task limit, and no feature that turns out to be paid at the download step.

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