PDF Compressor vs. Decrease PDF Size

Both are Chrome extensions for shrinking PDF files. They work differently under the hood — here's what we found testing Decrease PDF Size against PDF Compressor, point by point.

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Side by Side

	PDF Compressor	Decrease PDF Size
Where compression happens	Entirely in your browser, on your device	Your file is uploaded to a remote server for processing
File leaves your computer?	No	Yes
Maximum file size	150MB per file	60MB per file
Multiple files at once	Yes — select several PDFs and compress them in one batch, with a combined ZIP download	No — one file at a time

What This Means in Practice

Decrease PDF Size is built around a server round trip: when you pick a file, the extension's own code packages it into a form submission and sends it off to a remote compression service before you get a result back. That means every file you compress briefly leaves your device and depends on an internet connection and a third party's server to come back. PDF Compressor runs the entire compression pipeline inside the extension itself — nothing is ever uploaded, and there's no server step for your file to pass through.

That architecture also shows up in two practical limits. Decrease PDF Size caps uploads at 60MB per file, likely a constraint of running compression on shared server infrastructure. PDF Compressor supports files up to 150MB, since processing happens on your own machine rather than someone else's server. Decrease PDF Size also only accepts one file at a time — there's no option to select a batch. PDF Compressor lets you select multiple PDFs in one go and downloads all the compressed results together as a ZIP.

For a deeper look at why local, in-browser processing differs from any upload-based PDF tool — not just this one — see the local vs. upload comparison page.

How we checked this: the comparison points above come from examining each extension's own packaged code (the files Chrome downloads when you install it from the Chrome Web Store) — specifically, the network requests and file-size checks it runs before compressing a file. We didn't test every feature of Decrease PDF Size and don't make claims about anything we didn't verify directly.

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