Free Document Tracking Software: 10 Tools, Honestly Compared
By Oleh Tsyupa, Founder of PDFTrackr · Published 2026-08-13 · Updated 2026-08-13
13 min read26.7% of recorded reading sessions on a multi-page document reached its last page. 73.3% did not.
This is why the free-plan question is really a measurement question. A tool that reports opens tells you the link was loaded; it cannot separate the reader who finished from the 73.3% who did not — a group that includes 402 sessions which rendered no page at all, not only readers who stopped midway. Of the 3,094 sessions that rendered a page at all, the median got 25% of the way through the document it opened. The full dataset, its three caveats and the definition of "finished" live on our whitepaper completion page.
Based on 3,496 recorded sessions across 234 documents and 262 share links, 22 Sep 2025 – 5 Aug 2026, extracted 5 Aug 2026 — multi-page documents only, because a one-page document is finished by being opened. That restriction drops 150 sessions from the 3,646 recorded: 80 on one-page documents, and 70 more whose document has no page count on record. A session counts as finished when the furthest page it rendered is at least the document's page count. Every recorded session inside the restriction is counted, automated ones included, so the group that renders nothing at all stays in the denominator.
You can check that split on a PDF of your own before reading any further: create a free tracked link — 50 files, 12 months of history, no card. The rest of this page is the comparison.
All 10 document tracking tools, compared by what the free plan gives you
Three columns decide this choice: whether the free plan is permanent or a trial, the deepest signal the tool records about a sent document, and how long the analytics survive. Retention is the one most people skip and then regret: a deal that reopens in month three needs a record that still exists then. Prices, tiers and limits come from the vendor's own pricing page, fetched 12 Aug 2026 and listed with its URL below; three signal cells say we did not read that page for what its analytics measure, and five retention cells record that no figure appeared on it.
| Tool | Permanent free plan | Deepest signal it records | Analytics retention on the cheapest plan | Entry paid price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PDFTrackr | Yes · 500MB · 50 files · 50 links · PDF only | Per-page reading, automated opens excluded | 12 months, on the free plan | $9/mo |
| Papermark | Yes | Page-by-page analytics | 30 days | €29/month billed monthly (€24/month billed annually) |
| Peony | Yes · up to 50 documents, page-by-page analytics, unlimited visitors · 3 e-signatures per month, free (we offer none) | Page-by-page analytics | 30 days | $30/admin/month billed annually |
| PandaDoc | Yes · 60 documents/year, real-time tracking | Real-time tracking and notifications | Not published | $19 USD seat cost per month billed annually ($35/seat/month billed monthly) |
| HummingDeck | Yes · five documents, five links | Per-page analytics from Starter (paid), not Free | Real-time only — no history kept | $10/mo billed monthly, 1 user (or $8/mo billed annually, $96/yr) |
| DocSend | none — trial only | Not read from its pricing page this pass | Not published | $10/user/month billed yearly ($15/user/month billed monthly) |
| Digify | none — trial only | Not read from its pricing page this pass | Not published | $140/mo billed annually ($190 monthly) |
| Ellty | no free plan on the pricing page — 14-day full-access trial, no credit card (FAQ also mentions a "free tier" that the page never lists) | Not read from its pricing page this pass | Not published | PLN 149/month billed yearly (PLN 249/month billed monthly) |
| Sizle | none — 7-day trial | “Tracking & Access Controls”, its own label | Not published | $20/mo billed annually (or $29/mo billed monthly) |
| Orangedox | none — 14-day free trial, no card | “Document engagement history”, its own label | 6-month retention | $55 USD/month billed yearly |
Five of the ten rows read “not published”: no retention figure appeared on the pricing pages we read on 12 Aug 2026 — not that those vendors keep nothing, nor that the figure exists nowhere on their sites. Where a vendor does publish one, it is quoted here, and we have not inferred a number for anybody. HummingDeck states the bluntest position of the four competitors that do publish one: its compare grid puts the free tier at real-time only, so nothing is kept to look at later.
“Free” means three different things on these pricing pages
Across the ten pricing pages above, free resolves into three separate offers, and the difference between them is the difference between a tool you can keep and a tool you have to decide about in a fortnight.
A permanent plan. Five of the ten publish a $0 tier that does not expire. HummingDeck is the most explicit: five documents and five links, and its page says they are yours “forever”. What that tier does not include, its compare grid states outright: per-page analytics marked not included, and analytics retention at real-time only.
A trial wearing the word. DocSend, Digify, Sizle and Orangedox have no free tier on the plan table, only a trial — seven days at Sizle, which calls it full access, and fourteen at Orangedox. We did not read trial lengths for DocSend or Digify on this pass; neither vendor file holds one. That is a legitimate way to sell software, and it is not a free plan.
And one page that says both. Ellty is the honest curiosity of this set. Its pricing page publishes three paid cards and no free column, every call to action is “Start free trial”, and the Compare Plans grid has exactly those three columns — yet its own FAQ answer ends by telling you that when the trial ends you can “pick the plan that suits you or stay on the free tier”. Our cell records that gap rather than resolving it: no free plan on the pricing page — 14-day full-access trial, no credit card (FAQ also mentions a "free tier" that the page never lists). If you are choosing Ellty for a free tier, ask them what is on it before you start the clock, because the page does not say.
A fourth distinction sits underneath all of this and decides more than the price does. A free plan that records opens and one that records per-page reading answer different questions. HummingDeck is the clean example: its free tier is permanent and generous with links, but the page puts per-page analytics on Starter (paid), not Free. Among the five permanent free plans here, PDFTrackr, Papermark and Peony are the three that publish page-by-page reading at no cost.
The five with a permanent free plan
These five publish a $0 tier with no clock on it. Three measure reading page by page; HummingDeck does not, and PandaDoc does not say.
PDFTrackr
Upload the PDF — we take PDFs and nothing else, worth checking against this list — create a link, send the link instead of the attachment. You get page-by-page reading — which pages were reached, how long each held the reader — plus an email gate, password, expiry and download control, all free. The free tier is 500MB across 50 files and 50 share links, 50MB per file, with no clock on it and no card at signup. Automated opens are excluded from the counts rather than inflating them, so a mail-security scanner following the link does not read as interest — the share of traffic that turns out to be is in are PDF view counts real.
The column worth being specific about is retention: the one we win on, and the one these pricing pages are quietest about. PDFTrackr's free plan keeps 12 months of reading history and every view inside it. Of the five permanent free plans on this page, that is the longest published window: Papermark's free tier publishes 30 days, Peony's publishes 30 days, HummingDeck's is real-time only with nothing kept, and PandaDoc publishes no figure on the page we read. On a deal that goes quiet in March and reopens in June, a 30-day window has nothing left to compare against and ours still does. Folders, CSV export, versioning, watermarking and real-time open alerts are the Pro features; the free plan collects the same events into a daily digest instead.
The upgrade has one honest trigger, and it is not storage. Free is the whole product while you are sending documents one at a time and can read yesterday's activity over coffee — the reading data is the same reading data, not a preview of it. Pro becomes the right buy, at $9/mo, the moment that stops being true: once you are pasting a separate link per recipient by hand, bulk personalised links and a folder per client are what you are paying for, and when a live deal is worth chasing the same day, the real-time open alert reaches you within the hour where the free plan tells you tomorrow morning. The ceilings move too — 10GB, 500 files, unlimited links, 24 months of history — but on a document you are waiting on, the alert is what you are buying. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.
Best for: Sending finished documents outward and needing the reading history to still be there when the conversation restarts months later.
Honest weakness: No e-signature, no document editor and no data rooms. If the job is get this signed rather than find out whether it was read, PandaDoc does the whole workflow and we do not do that part at all.
Papermark
Open source, the closest equivalent here. Its free tier carries page-by-page analytics; what separates it from ours is memory, not capability. The free plan publishes 30 days, its compare grid holds the last 20 views on free against up to 1,000 last views on Pro, and at €29/month billed monthly (€24/month billed annually) that cap moves rather than disappearing — Business and Data Rooms are uncapped.
Best for: Anyone who has to read the code before trusting it — the source is public, which is not true of us.
Honest weakness: Thirty days of analytics retention on free, and a visible-history cap that persists into the first paid tier.
Peony
Design-led, per admin. Its free card lists up to 50 documents, page-by-page analytics, unlimited visitors, with password protection, email capture and three e-signatures a month — the last of those being something we do not offer on any tier. Retention on that free tier is 30 days. Business is $30/admin/month billed annually, and it is the tier where the security controls arrive — email authentication, allow and block visitor lists, screenshot protection and download prevention — with the data-room tier a step above at $52/admin/month billed annually.
Best for: A free plan that reads like a paid one — page-by-page analytics, password protection, email capture and a few e-signatures a month, all at $0.
Honest weakness: Priced per admin, so a second person who needs to send documents doubles the bill; and its free analytics window is 30 days.
PandaDoc
A proposal, contract and e-signature suite where tracking is one bundled feature rather than the product. Its free plan is unusually complete for a suite of that size — 60 documents/year, real-time tracking — and the tracking is included rather than held back for the paid tiers. Starter is $19 USD seat cost per month billed annually ($35/seat/month billed monthly). What the pricing page does not say is what “real-time tracking” measures: there is no statement that it reports per page, so treat the depth as unstated rather than present.
Best for: Fewer than about five documents a month where the document has to be signed as well as read — the free plan covers that whole workflow at $0.
Honest weakness: Sixty documents a year is five a month, and the depth of the tracking is not published, so you cannot tell from the page whether it measures pages or opens.
HummingDeck
A deck-and-document tool with deal rooms, and the clearest case here of a permanent free plan without the measurement people come for. Free is five documents and five links, and the page frames those as yours forever. Per-page analytics and engagement flow are listed as Starter (paid), not Free — Starter is $10/mo billed monthly, 1 user (or $8/mo billed annually, $96/yr) and Pro $25/user/mo billed monthly (or $20/user/mo billed annually, $240/yr), where email capture arrives and the deal-room count rises rather than the deal rooms themselves.
Best for: Trying a deal-room workflow at no cost, where five documents and five links is enough to judge it.
Honest weakness: The per-page reading this page is about is a paid feature, so its free plan previews the workflow rather than the analytics.
The five that are trial-only
None of these five publishes a free tier on its plan table. Choosing one is choosing to pay — better known before the clock starts than on day fifteen.
DocSend
The category's reference implementation, now owned by Dropbox, and the tool these pages are compared against. There is no free plan on its pricing table: none — trial only. Personal is $10/user/month billed yearly ($15/user/month billed monthly), priced per user, so the bill scales with headcount.
Best for: Teams already paying for a document stack, where the reference implementation is worth its per-user price.
Honest weakness: No free tier on the pricing table, and the entry plan we read is priced per user.
Digify
Security-first document sharing and data rooms, aimed at deals rather than single documents. There is no free tier: none — trial only. Pro is $140/mo billed annually ($190 monthly) — the highest entry price here by a wide margin, and consistent with a data-room product priced against other data rooms.
Best for: Due diligence and deal processes where a data room with document-level controls is the requirement.
Honest weakness: Priced for a deal, not a document, and there is no permanent free plan to test it on.
Ellty
A data-room product, and the page whose free-tier story does not resolve — set out above. We did not read what its analytics measure. Recorded as no free plan on the pricing page — 14-day full-access trial, no credit card (FAQ also mentions a "free tier" that the page never lists). Standard is PLN 149/month billed yearly (PLN 249/month billed monthly), Data Room PLN 289/month billed yearly, 2 users included (PLN 549/month billed monthly) and Data Room Plus PLN 729/month billed yearly, 3 users included (PLN 1,279/month billed monthly) — in złoty, which is what its pricing page rendered to our European exit, with no dollar set we could read.
Best for: Data-room work where two or three seats are included rather than charged per user.
Honest weakness: Its pricing page and FAQ disagree about whether a free tier exists, and the page publishes no limits for one.
Sizle
Document sharing with tracking and dealrooms, and the entry tier is more generous than its price suggests. No free tier: none — 7-day trial. Starter is $20/mo billed annually (or $29/mo billed monthly), and its own card lists unlimited documents, team members and viewers against a single dealroom — so what separates it from the tier above is dealroom count, not document count. The opposite has been published about Sizle before, including by us.
Best for: One person running deals who wants unlimited documents and viewers, no per-seat bill.
Honest weakness: Seven days is the shortest of the three trial lengths we read on these pricing pages — Ellty and Orangedox both run fourteen — and there is no free plan behind it.
Orangedox
Document tracking built around Drive and Dropbox folders, so documents stay where they are. There is no free tier: none — 14-day free trial, no card. Starter is $55 USD/month billed yearly and carries 6-month retention — one of only four competitors here whose pricing page states a retention position at all, and half of what our free plan keeps.
Best for: Teams wanting tracking without moving documents out of Drive or Dropbox.
Honest weakness: The cheapest plan is $55 USD/month billed yearly carrying 6-month retention, against free tiers on this page that publish page-by-page analytics at no cost.
Where these tools beat us
Three are the better buy for a specific job — a listicle written by a vendor should say where it loses.
PandaDoc beats us on total workflow at zero cost. Its free plan is 60 documents/year, real-time tracking, in a product that also does e-signature — and we do not do e-signature on any tier. If the document has to come back signed, that is a complete process for nothing, and we are at best a second tool beside it.
Peony beats us on e-signature, on real-time notification of a visit, and on tracked-link volume — each on its free tier, and each bounded below. Its free card lists three e-signatures a month, and we do not sign documents on any tier at any price. Its compare grid puts real-time visit notifications included on every tier, Free first, where our real-time open alert is a Pro feature and the free plan gathers the same events into the next morning's digest. And that grid ticks tracked links for the free tier with no number beside it, where we cap share links at 50. On retention, the column this page opens on, our twelve months beats their thirty days.
Papermark beats us on auditability. Its source is public and ours is not, and for anyone who has to read the code before trusting it with a document, that option does not exist on our side at any price. Run Papermark if the code has to be inspectable; run us if the conversation outlives the month.
What the reading data says about which column matters
Across 3,496 recorded sessions on our own multi-page documents, 26.7% reached the last page and 73.3% did not. Read a second way, because the denominator matters: 933 of the 1,915 sessions that got past page one went on to finish — 48.7%, so even among readers who were genuinely reading, slightly fewer than half reached the end.
If roughly one recorded session in four finishes the document, “opened” and “read” are different events for three quarters of the traffic, and a free plan reporting only the first cannot tell you which you had. That is the axis this page grades on, and it is why HummingDeck's free tier is separated out above from the three that publish per-page reading. The full dataset, including the sessions that rendered no page at all and what that does to the denominator, is on does anyone finish your whitepaper.
How we evaluated these tools
Every price, limit and free-plan cell above was read from the vendor's own pricing page, not from a directory listing or a rival's comparison — on 12 Aug 2026, except HummingDeck's retention row and Peony's notifications row, both read from their compare grids on 13 Aug 2026. Where a claim turns on which tier a feature sits on, the feature grid was read rather than the plan summary — the reason HummingDeck's per-page cell says Starter rather than Free, and the reason Sizle's entry tier is recorded as carrying unlimited documents.
Prices carry their billing period, because most pricing pages here load on the annually-billed rate and show the monthly one only behind a toggle: Papermark, PandaDoc, DocSend, Digify, Ellty and Sizle all do this, and quoting the headline figure without the period overstates every one of them. Prices are also given with their currency zone. HummingDeck is the one page here documented as resolving its currency from the reader's location — it gave us złoty and also publishes its own dollar set, which is the set quoted. Papermark offers a dollar/euro switch the reader operates and rendered euros to us. Ellty rendered złoty and we found no dollar figures we could verify, so złoty is what appears above.
Where a vendor publishes nothing, this page records the absence rather than inferring one. That is why five retention cells read “not published” and why PandaDoc's tracking depth is recorded as unstated. Where the page does infer, it says so. HummingDeck is no longer one of those cases: its compare grid marks per-page analytics as not included on the free tier and puts that tier at real-time only, which is the vendor stating both, not us inferring either. Vendor pricing changes without notice, so this comparison carries a re-verification date and every row is re-checked monthly. If you are about to buy on a cell here, open the vendor's pricing page first — and if a cell has drifted, tell us. The wider free-tier comparison across every PDF tracker we have profiled is in our guide to free PDF tracking tools, and free PDF tracking covers what the mechanism does and does not see.
Frequently asked questions
Is there genuinely free document tracking software?
Yes, but fewer tools than the search results suggest. Of the ten compared here, five publish a permanent $0 plan: PDFTrackr (PDFs only), Papermark, Peony, PandaDoc and HummingDeck. The other five — DocSend, Digify, Ellty, Sizle and Orangedox — publish no free tier on their plan tables, only a trial; Ellty is the one qualified case, because its own FAQ mentions a free tier its pricing page never lists. Of the five permanent plans, PDFTrackr, Papermark and Peony are the three that include page-by-page reading at no cost.
What is the difference between document tracking and document management software?
Document management software organises files inside your own organisation — versions, approvals, permissions, who checked what out of the repository. Document tracking measures what happens to a document after you send it to someone outside. This search returns both, and only the second kind can tell you whether a recipient read what you sent.
How long do free plans keep the analytics?
This is the dimension that varies most and the one pricing pages are quietest about. PDFTrackr's free plan keeps 12 months. Papermark publishes 30 days on free and Peony publishes 30 days. HummingDeck's compare grid puts its free tier at real-time only, so nothing is retained; PandaDoc publishes no figure on the page we read. Among the paid-only tools, Orangedox publishes 6-month retention on its cheapest plan.
Can free document tracking tell me if someone actually read the document?
Only if it measures per page. An open records that the link was loaded, which can be a person or a mail-security scanner. Per-page reading records which pages rendered and for how long, which is what separates a reader who finished from one who stopped. In our own production data, 26.7% of recorded sessions on a multi-page document reached the last page, so for most traffic those two events are genuinely different.
Does document tracking work if I send the file as an email attachment?
No. An attachment is a copy sitting on the recipient's device with no connection back to you. Every tool on this page works by replacing the attachment with a link to a document it hosts, and measuring the link. If sending an attachment is non-negotiable, none of these tools will help.
Which of these is cheapest if I do need to pay?
PDFTrackr's Pro is the lowest monthly-billed paid tier on this page at $9/mo, and $84/yr on annual billing. Among the others, HummingDeck's Starter is $10/mo billed monthly, 1 user (or $8/mo billed annually, $96/yr) and DocSend's Personal is $10/user/month billed yearly ($15/user/month billed monthly). Digify's Pro at $140/mo billed annually ($190 monthly) is the highest, which reflects that it is sold as a data room rather than as a document tracker.
Do any of these tools offer e-signature on the free plan?
Two of the ten publish one on the pages we read. PandaDoc's free plan is 60 documents/year, real-time tracking in a product built around e-signature, and Peony's free card lists three e-signatures a month alongside its page-by-page analytics. PDFTrackr does not offer e-signature on any tier, and neither tracking nor reading analytics is a substitute for it. If a document needs signing, choose a tool that signs natively rather than adding a second product to the process.
Sources
- Papermark — Pricing (accessed 2026-08-12)
- Peony — Pricing (accessed 2026-08-13)
- PandaDoc — Pricing (accessed 2026-08-12)
- HummingDeck — Pricing (accessed 2026-08-13)
- DocSend — Pricing (accessed 2026-08-12)
- Digify — Pricing (accessed 2026-08-12)
- Ellty — Plans (accessed 2026-08-12)
- Sizle — Pricing (accessed 2026-08-12)
- Orangedox — Pricing (accessed 2026-08-12)
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Oleh Tsyupa
Founder, PDFTrackr
Has analysed over 3,000 tracked document-viewing sessions on PDFTrackr.