Papermark vs Peony: An Outside Comparison

If you are comparing these two because one document needs sending this week, create a free tracked link and read your own session back before you commit to anything — or open the live demo on sample data first. The rest of this page is the comparison.

What actually decides it: three published questions

These two are close enough that a feature-list comparison will not separate them. Both publish a plan that costs nothing, both put page-by-page reading on it, and both keep 30 days of analytics history there. The questions that decide it are narrower, and each is answered here only as far as our dated reads go.

Does the document need something done to it, or only measured? If a reader has to sign, Peony publishes 3 e-signatures per month, free; Papermark's e-signature is for NDAs only, on its Data Rooms plan and higher. Does the reading data have to stay on your own infrastructure? Papermark has an open-source core and a self-hosting option that is free only for personal, non-commercial use, with a paid licence for a team or company; Peony publishes a self-hosted deployment on its Enterprise tier only. And what does the record look like in six weeks? Both free tiers are thirty-day windows, which is short for anything that keeps being read after the week you sent it.

Everything else — which viewer feels nicer, whose analytics go deeper — is either taste or an assertion this page cannot check, and it makes none.

Where Peony wins: signing and live notifications

Peony's free plan is the more generous of the two on what it lets a reader do rather than on volume. Here is the tier card, transcribed rather than summarised:

“Free $0 /admin/month Personal shares, CVs, trying it out … Key features: Up to 50 documents Page-by-page analytics … Unlimited visitors Password protection … Email capture … 3 e-signatures per month”— Peony's own pricing page, read from the raw page on 19 Sep 2026

The first win is signing. 3 e-signatures per month, free — a signature is a different job from a view count, and one link doing both saves a round trip. The other two headline cells on that card are not a tiebreak: Papermark's own pricing page puts page by page analytics on every plan, the free plan included and unlimited visitors there too. Unlimited visitors is Peony's own phrase and it means readers rather than links: its published position on links is tracked links included with no published cap (documents are capped at 50), which is not the same claim as unlimited links and should not be repeated as one.

The second win is timing. Its real-time visit notifications are included on every tier, Free first. PDFTrackr puts real-time open alerts behind Pro and gives free senders a daily digest, so on this row we lose to Peony outright and there is no way to read the tiers that makes us look better.

One more detail is where its security controls sit, and it is the kind of detail a tier-card comparison gets wrong. Allow and block lists, email authentication, download prevention and a simple NDA are on Business ($30/admin/month billed annually), not the Data Room ($52/admin/month billed annually) — that is, the cheapest published paid tier, not the data-room tier above it. A reader who assumed those were data-room features would budget $52/admin/month billed annually when $30/admin/month billed annually is the row they actually need.

Where Papermark wins: open-source code, and more kinds of file

Papermark's core is open source. A team that cannot put reading data on somebody else's server can read the code before trusting it — PDFTrackr is hosted only and offers nothing like it at any price. The scope matters: the core is under the AGPLv3 licence, while the ee/ and app/(ee) directories are under a separate commercial licence. Self-hosting is a separate question. It is free only for personal, non-commercial use, without data rooms or the advanced security features, and a team or company needs a paid self-hosting licence. Peony also publishes a self-hosted deployment, but on its Enterprise tier only, at custom pricing, and no open-source statement about its own software appeared on the pages we read.

Its second win is breadth of input: the free tier takes PDF, Notion pages, images and spreadsheets, with Word documents, videos and presentations on Pro. If what you send is not a PDF that matters immediately, and it is a straightforward loss for PDFTrackr, which takes PDFs and nothing else, on purpose.

The free plan has a shape, though, and the shape is the part people discover late. Beyond the 30 days of retention, the vendor's own plan-comparison grid carries a row headed Unlimited view history whose entry paid column reads up to 1,000 last views; the Business and Data Rooms columns of that same row read unlimited. Those are ceilings on the RECORD rather than on the sending. Paid starts at €29/month billed monthly (€24/month billed annually).

One thing its free plan does that is worth knowing if you live in an inbox: an email each time a document is viewed. That is a frequency, not a latency — the pages we read never use the words real-time, instant or immediately about that setting, and we are not going to add them.

The three side by side, on what each one publishes

Every competitor cell below is a published figure with a fetch date. We read Papermark's pricing page in euros (it also offers a USD switch) and Peony's in dollars, and nothing here is converted.

Where PDFTrackr fits, and where it does not

PDFTrackr belongs here for one job and not the others. If the question is whether a document was read and how far, all three answer it, and PDFTrackr wins on what the answer costs and how long it lasts: page-by-page reading, viewer identification by email, 365 days of history and every view kept, on a plan with no card. Retention decides more arguments than depth does — a thirty-day window means a proposal sent in March is unanswerable in May.

The second thing it does is keep machines out of the number. Automated opens are classified when the session closes and kept out of the counts, and the dashboard shows what the filter removed rather than quietly shrinking the number. How much that matters to your own documents is measured on our page on the difference between an open, a click and a read.

Where it does not fit: no e-signature at any tier, no self-hosting, PDFs only, and no data room — one file per share link, so a bundle of documents is several links with several sets of numbers. If any of those is the requirement, buy one of the other two rather than working around us. And if the real question is a different pairing, DocSend versus Papermark takes that one apart the same way, while the best free PDF tracking tools compares the whole free field rather than two of it.

When Pro becomes the right choice

Free is not a teaser here. Page-by-page reading, the automated-open filter, viewer identification and twelve months of history are all on the plan that costs nothing, and they are the same data rather than a preview of it.

Upgrade at the point where the sending becomes a routine rather than an event. Once you are pasting a personalised link per person by hand, bulk personalised links generate one each in a single pass and the record carries a name instead of an inference. Once the same reader starts coming back and the timing is the signal, the return-visit alert tells you the hour it happens rather than the next morning — that is also the row where Peony beats our free tier, so it is a fair thing to weigh. And once you pass fifty files or fifty active links, the flat account removes the link ceiling and raises the file ceiling to 500. Look at the demo dashboard before deciding, or create a free account and read one of your own documents back.

Keep reading: the best free PDF tracking tools, DocSend vs Papermark, and opened, clicked, or read. Or start with how free PDF tracking works.