Comparing the Best PDF Watermarkers for WooCommerce

The two best plugins available for WooCommerce PDF file download watermarking/passwording are WooCommerce PDF Watermark and PDF Watermark for WooCommerce (FKA WaterWoo, sold here).

Both plugins have been available for many years, both plugins perform the same essential tasks, and yet they are quite different under the hood. They offer different features, and at different price points. If you’re considering purchasing one or the other, this post will clearly show you which is the better choice — by far.

  1. The bundled software
  2. Feature comparison
  3. Image watermarking
  4. Available fonts
  5. Watermark opacity
  6. Watermark locations on the page
  7. Pages to watermark
  8. PDF security
  9. Product-by-product settings
  10. File management
  11. Missing features
  12. Plugin price

What’s under the hood:

Both plugins use free, open-source PDF manipulation libraries to accomplish passwording and watermarking.

WooCommerce’s offering uses FPDI to parse PDFs and FPDF to re-write them.
As of October 2023, WooCommerce is using version 2.36 of FPDI, released in February 2021. Version 2.5.0 is available, released September this year. This means not only could their parser be faster, but might also be missing security fixes. The plugin uses version 1.8.4 of FPDF, released August 2021, when version 1.8.6, released June 2023 is available.

FPDI and FPDF are excellent products written by friends of ours; however, the free versions of these libraries are limited because they only work with older PDFs (version 1.4 PDF or older).

Our offering uses TCPDI to parse PDFs and TCPDF to re-write them.

TCPDF was originally derived in 2002 from FPDF by Olivier Plathey (http://www.fpdf.org), but now is almost entirely rewritten and contains thousands of new lines of code and hundreds new features.

In house, we are constantly working to keep the bundled TCPDI and TCPDF versions current. We take that a bit further and even contribute to those software projects for everyone’s benefit. These libraries function with all current versions of PDF. There is no limit to PDFs version 1.4 or older. There is no paywall to get more features, as there is with FPDI.

Feature Comparison

Image watermarking

Adding an image to an existing PDF is a feature of both plugins; however, our offering allows you to do it anywhere amidst watermark text using an HTML <img> tag. WooCommerce’s plugin does not allow HTML in watermarks. Lack of control with HTML tags such as <p>, <br>, <strong>, and <em> (to name a few) can be crippling for folks who want to “design” their watermark. Our plugin allows the use of most common HTML tags in watermark text, translated straight onto the page!

Fonts

Both plugins come with core fonts offered by their respective PDF manipulation libraries (FPDF/TCPDF). However, our offering allows the administrator to add their own TTF font files so that watermarks can match branding. That means our plugin allows the user to watermark with nearly any font, not just Times, Helvetica, or Courier. Our plugin offers better support for non-English languages, since it also includes different subsetted fonts straight out of the box.

Watermark Opacity

Both plugins allow watermark opacity to be set lower. Our plugin does this using a shortcode, allowing for hundredth (.01, .02, etc.) increments and for some text to be transparent while other text is not, while the WooCommerce plugin sets opacity in the settings and it applies to the entire watermark.

Watermark Locations

Both plugins offer similar options for placing a watermark anywhere on the page; however, WooCommerce’s offers only one watermark location whereas our offering allows for two watermarks per page. This could allow the administrator to apply one visible watermark and one tiny invisible watermark, which would increase security, and the potential thief’s paranoia. Hidden watermarks — not visible ones — are perhaps the best way to track PDFs and thwart/fight intellectual property theft. Both plugins would allow hidden watermarks, but with the two placements our plugin allows, it’s easy to make the customer think there’s only one watermark, when in fact there are two!

Our RTL setting is not only handy for RTL languages, but also for aligning marks faithfully along the right margin, such as is useful in marking sheet music.

Pages to Watermark

WooCommerce’s allows the administrator to set pages to “All,” “First,” “Last,” or “Alternate”. Our offering allows watermarking to start on a specified page (e.g. page 2), end on a specified page, and beyond that allows “All,” “First,” “Last,” “Odd”, or “Even” pages to be watermarked. Furthermore, filter hooks are available to exclude specific pages in a range. WooCommerce does not allow that. With our offering, you can get a lot more control of which pages are watermarked.

PDF Protection

WooCommerce’s offering allows RC4-128 encryption for PDFs, with the basic four PDF protections of “Disable Print,” “Disable Copy”, “Disable Modify,” and “Disable Annotate”. This is a real shame, but part of the limitation of using the free version of FPDF. Arcfour encryption is generally accepted as being weak, and so these days if your server can handle it, you want to be using AES encryption for your PDFs. This is possible with our offering. AES encryption of PDF offers the four basic PDF protections, as well as more advanced protections like “Disable High-Resolution Printing,” “Disable Assembly,” “Disable Form Filling,” “Disable Accessibility”.

Both plugins allow for using the customer’s email as the PDF password. WooCommerce’s offering also allows using the Order ID as a PDF password, but we’re not sure the use cases of that, since order numbers are difficult to remember or find. Our offering allows for an owner password to be reset, and for the option of a user password to become the owner password, essentially handing over the keys to a PDF to the purchaser. These options might have a limited use case, but they’re available. Overall, our encryption and passwording is much more robust than WooCommerce’s.

Product-by-product plugin settings

WooCommerce’s plugin offers the option to override the watermark content (text/image) or turn watermarking off per product. It does not allow for different watermark settings between product variations.

Our plugin offers FULL override per product, such that if you want a different PDF product to have a totally different content, placement, font, opacity, content, password, and encryption level, that is possible.

Our offering also allows full override per product variation.

File management

What happens to the PDF files when they’re being manipulated just before delivery, and after delivery? This is a mystery most people don’t spend much time thinking about, but these files can amass and cause problems if left on the server.

WooCommerce’s offering sends altered PDFs to a file with a changed filename into its original folder, yet has no settings or means to send elsewhere or clean up afterward.

Our offering sends out PDFs depending on the type of WooCommerce download (in Woo downloadable product settings). If it’s a forced download, no file is stored on the server. Otherwise, files are stored separately in the wp-content/uploads/ directory in a unique folder which can be perused in a meaningful way, since sub-folders are named by customer order number. Furthermore, the plugin includes settings to clean up these files by CRON if desired on a “hourly,” “twice daily,” “daily,” “weekly,” every 15 day,” or “monthly” basis. They can also be left on the server if that is preferred.

When the file is delivered, our plugin does not change the filename. The customer gets the PDF with its intended file name, unless you decide to change the name using filter hooks.

Additionally, if you would like to save on bandwidth, our offering has a unique setting to allow previously watermarked (and stored) PDF files to be re-delivered on customer request, instead of going through marking again (which can be CPU-intensive).

Features missing in WooCommerce’s offering

  • Does not handle PDF versions 1.5, 1.6, or 1.7
  • Only one watermark location
  • Only one image watermark
  • No HTML in watermarks
  • No custom fonts
  • No RTL watermarking
  • No barcodes or QR codes
  • File name and placement management
  • No RC4-40 or AES encryption levels
  • Per-product settings do not have full settings override, or variation override

Features missing in our offering

  • No ePub watermarking

Both plugins lack the ability to handle more complex/sophisticated PDFs, such as those with fillable forms, layers, incrementation, or web-optimization. If you need complete fidelity, please use the ONLY plugin capable of handling ALL PDFs: PDF Stamper for WooCommerce.

The price

Our plugin has always been priced about $10 lower than WooCommerce’s offering, despite offering more features. Currently WooCommerce charges $99, while we charge $90. This is impossible to explain. Just enjoy it!

via GIPHY

Ultimately, we find that in the case of WooCommerce’s offering, you pay more but get less. The free version of our plugin offers many of the same features as WooCommerce’s $99 plugin! If you are specifically looking to mark ePub, then we would recommend WooCommerce’s plugin, otherwise, we welcome you to try out PDF Watermark for WooCommerce (FKA WaterWoo) with no risk. We offer a 30-day no questions asked refund policy for the paid version, and priority email support!

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