NextPDF Premium · Edition

NextPDF Premium

At a glance

NextPDF Premium is the commercial offering built on the open-source NextPDF engine. It comes in two editions — NextPDF Pro and NextPDF Enterprise — that extend the core with advanced document generation, trusted digital signing, and standards conformance for regulated workflows. Both editions plug in behind the same public contracts the open-source core already exposes. So you adopt Premium by buying and activating a license rather than rewriting your application.

NextPDF ships as four distributions: open-source NextPDF, the open-source NextPDF Server HTTP service, NextPDF Pro, and NextPDF Enterprise. Pro and Enterprise are the two commercial editions. A signed license names the active edition, and the editions are cumulative. Pro includes everything in the open core, and Enterprise includes everything in Pro.

Start here to navigate the public Premium documentation:

Page	What it covers
Feature matrix	Compare the open core, NextPDF Pro, and NextPDF Enterprise at the capability level.
Licensing and activation	How to buy, evaluate, and activate a license with no application code change.
Compliance and conformance	The document, signature, and e-invoicing standards Premium capabilities conform to.
HSM and FIPS validation	Hardware security module support, FIPS-validated cryptography, and the evidence you can request.
NextPDF Pro capabilities	The full `nextpdf/pro` capability tree: generation, document operations, extraction, signing, and integration.
NextPDF Enterprise capabilities	The full `nextpdf/enterprise` capability tree: trust, validation, archival, content security, and platform operations.
Pro quick start	From license envelope to a first templated, baseline-signed PDF.
Enterprise quick start	From license envelope to verifying a signed PDF and upgrading it for archival.
Evaluating NextPDF Premium	Role-specific evaluation briefs for engineering leaders, procurement, legal, and security teams.

What Pro adds

NextPDF Pro is the step up from the open-source core for teams whose documents have outgrown one-off generation. It serves products that compose, transform, and sign PDFs as a routine part of their pipeline. Pro adds buyer value in four areas:

Richer generation. A flow layout engine, automatic table-of-contents generation, reusable templates, charts, and advanced font tooling give you consistent, professional output without hand-built layout code.
Document operations. Advanced merge, document comparison, classification, optimization, and structural manipulation let you process PDFs that arrive from many sources, not only the ones you generate.
Specialty barcodes. Industrial and retail symbologies cover logistics, supply-chain, and regulated labeling needs that the open core does not carry.
Trusted output. Baseline digital signatures, sensitive-data detection, and text masking let you ship documents that are signed and privacy-aware before they leave your system.

Teams build regulated documents, logistics and retail labeling, multi-source document pipelines, and privacy-aware output on NextPDF Pro. When a workflow also needs long-term archival signing, hardware key custody, or audit-grade compliance evidence, it grows into NextPDF Enterprise.

Every Pro capability has its own page under NextPDF Pro capabilities, and the Pro quick start takes you from a license envelope to a first result.

What Enterprise adds

NextPDF Enterprise includes everything in NextPDF Pro and adds the assurance, longevity, and operational tooling that regulated and high-scale deployments require:

Long-term signing. The long-term (B-LT) and archival (B-LTA) signature profiles keep a signature verifiable for years, well beyond the life of the signing certificate.
Hardware key custody. Signing integrates with hardware security modules and FIPS-validated cryptographic modules, so private keys never leave certified hardware. See HSM and FIPS validation.
Compliance and archival. Archival-grade document profiles, long-term validation data, conformance validation, and packaged evidence support audits and regulated retention.
Forensics and intelligence. Tamper detection, document forensic analysis, and document intelligence support investigation, discovery, and high-assurance review.
Operational tooling. Entitlement, metering, billing, webhook delivery, and electronic filing support let you run NextPDF Enterprise as a managed service inside your own platform.

NextPDF Enterprise serves financial services, public-sector filing, regulated industries, and any organization that must prove what a document is, who signed it, and that it has not changed.

Every Enterprise capability has its own page under NextPDF Enterprise capabilities, and the Enterprise quick start takes you from a license envelope to verifying a signed document.

Compliance and assurance

Premium capabilities are built to conform to recognized document, signature, and e-invoicing standards, framed as conformance assurance for your auditors and your buyers. The compliance page sets out the standards each capability conforms to — archival document profiles, signature baseline profiles, the European e-invoicing semantic model, and the cryptographic-module assurance posture — with each normative claim cited to its standards body. The HSM and FIPS validation page covers hardware key custody and the validation evidence you can request before you buy.

NextPDF does not assert conformance on your behalf. It produces the artifacts a profile requires, and an independent validator or receiving authority decides whether a given file conforms. The conformance section documents that boundary in full.

Licensing and activation

A NextPDF Premium subscription is delivered as a single package whose signed license selects the active edition. You evaluate with the full feature set. Evaluation output carries a visible watermark that a paid license removes with no code change. Installing Premium does not by itself grant Pro or Enterprise — the license you activate determines which capabilities run.

Adoption is an install and an activation, not a migration. Your application keeps targeting the same public contracts whether it runs the open core, Pro, or Enterprise. So the code you have already written stays intact. See Licensing and activation for the full flow, and start an evaluation or talk to sales at the license portal.

If you are running a structured purchase evaluation, Evaluating NextPDF Premium routes engineering leaders, procurement, legal counsel, and security teams to role-specific briefs.

How to buy

Commercial licences are sold through our Merchant of Record — an authorised reseller that is the seller of record for your order, which takes payment, issues your invoice, and handles tax and refunds. Your licence is granted by PATEON under the EULA. See Buying and licensing for the purchase path, price and tax handling, and who to contact for billing versus product help.

Publication boundary

This page documents externally observable behavior and the supported public API surface only. Internal namespace paths, helper classes, mechanism tables, runbook filenames, and ticket prefixes are out of scope.