# What is the best free PDF to EPUB converter?

Source: https://epubcc.com/answers/best-free-pdf-to-epub-converter/ (updated 2026-11-04)

For a simple, single-column PDF with clean text, such as a novel, Calibre is free, runs on your own computer and is often enough. For columns, repeated headers, footnotes or long books, test converters on your own file: EpubCC's free sample converts up to 5 pages, and our public benchmark shows where each engine we measured wins and loses.

## When a free tool is enough

- One column of running text, with few headers and notes.
- You are comfortable checking the result and fixing a few paragraphs by hand.
- You don't mind installing desktop software. Calibre is open source and costs nothing.

## When to test more carefully

- Two or three columns, where lines from different columns can be glued together.
- Running headers and page numbers that end up in the middle of sentences.
- Footnotes you want linked rather than pasted into the text.
- Long books, where fixing problems by hand takes hours.
- Right-to-left or CJK text, where reading order and text direction matter.

## Free, but what about privacy?

A desktop tool keeps the file on your computer. With an online converter, read what happens to your upload: EpubCC never publishes files, never uses them for training, and deletes them automatically on a fixed, published schedule.

## How to compare converters fairly

Use the same PDF in each tool, open the result on the device you read on, and look at the hard pages: a page with columns, one with notes, one with a chapter start. Count sentences cut in half and headers left in the text.

Our benchmark does the same on a public corpus with independent reference texts. It currently covers our engine, PDFium, pdf_oxide, OpenDataLoader and pdftotext; Calibre has not been measured there yet, so we make no claim about how it scores. The table below is the continuity metric from that benchmark.

**Is EpubCC free?** The 5-page sample is free on any PDF, without an account, and the Free plan converts up to 100 pages a month. Larger books need a paid plan.

**Are online converters safe for private documents?** Check what each service does with your files. EpubCC deletes the EPUB 1 hour after the first download or 24 hours after it is ready, and never publishes files or uses them for training.

**Why isn't Calibre in your benchmark?** It has not been measured yet. We publish only results we have run on the corpus, including the ones where our engine loses.