Elephant Folio vs Folio
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Elephant Folio
This app automatically organizes your PDF documents using on-device AI. It intelligently files, tags, and categorizes PDFs from various sources, making them easily searchable. Your documents remain private and accessible across all your Apple devices.
- On-device AI for automatic filing
- Intelligent tagging and categorization
- Cross-device library sync via iCloud
- Capture PDFs from Safari, Mail, and camera
- Full-text search including document content
- Offline-first functionality
- Siri Shortcuts integration
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Elephant Folio is a PDF organizer built for people who read papers. Bring a paper in from Safari, Mail, or anywhere on your device, and Elephant Folio files it for you; based on what's actually inside it, not just the filename. The folders get made. The tags get applied. You keep reading. Rules that organize for you Set a rule once and every matching document gets tagged automatically. Match on filename, file contents, author, and more. You can combine conditions with a simple any/all toggle. Rules run the moment a file arrives, and you can re-run them on any file in your whole library anytime. No more tagging one file at a time. Smart organizing, on by default: When Apple Intelligence is available on one of your devices, Elephant Folio can also read and tag documents on its own. Your documents stay yours: Everything stays on your devices. Nothing is uploaded anywhere. Capture from anywhere: The Share extension works across Safari, Mail, Files, and anything else that can hand off a PDF. Scan a physical page and it's filed before you put your phone down and your rules apply instantly. Search that actually reaches: Not just filenames. Not just folders. Text, tags, and document content, so the thing you're looking for turns up even when you don't remember what you called it. One library across all your devices: iCloud keeps Mac, iPad, and iPhone in sync — down to the exact page you left off on. Files live in your Documents folder and open in any app that reads PDFs. Siri Shortcuts let Elephant Folio fit inside whatever system you've already built for yourself. Import from anywhere (even from the browser on a Windows): As long as you can access your iCloud folder, you can drag your PDF documents to Elephant Folio and they will be imported next time you open the app. No internet? No problem: Elephant Folio is a privacy-centric, offline-first app. Capture, read, tag, and search anywhere. The only network requests this app makes are ones to Apple's servers for iCloud syncing or those to fetch metadata from CrossRef/ArXiv/Pubmed. The elephant never forgets. Now neither do you. By using this app you agree to Apple's standard EULA: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula
Folio
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Every PDF tool you need — and not one byte of your document ever leaves your device. Online PDF tools are convenient until you read the fine print. Your contract, your payslip, your client's financial statement — uploaded to a server you don't control, retained for purposes you didn't agree to, mined for data you didn't consent to share. Folio makes that trade-off unnecessary. Folio is a full-featured PDF toolkit that runs entirely on your iPhone and iPad. No network connection. No account. No cloud sync. No analytics. Your files go in, your files come out — nothing in between. WHAT YOU CAN DO Organise — Merge multiple PDFs into one document — Split a PDF into separate files by page range — Reorder, rotate, or delete individual pages Reduce & Prepare — Compress PDFs to shrink file size without rebuilding content — Add watermarks or page numbers — Flatten form fields and annotations into a fixed document Convert (best-effort, on-device) — PDF to images: export pages as JPG or PNG — Images to PDF: combine photos into a single document — PDF to Word, Excel, or PowerPoint — conversion is handled entirely on-device using Apple's document frameworks; complex layouts may not reproduce with pixel-perfect fidelity, but no file is ever sent to a remote service to achieve it Protect — Password-protect a PDF with your chosen password — Remove password protection from a document you own Fill & Sign — Fill text fields in PDFs — Add your signature to any document Extract & Search — OCR: turn a scanned or photographed document into searchable, selectable text using Apple's on-device Vision framework — Extract all text from a PDF for copying or reference ZERO NETWORK DESIGN Folio ships with no networking capability. It cannot phone home. It cannot upload a file even if it wanted to. Every operation — compression, conversion, OCR, signing — runs on your device's own processor using Apple's built-in frameworks. This is not a marketing claim; it is a technical constraint we built in by design. This matters most when you are handling documents that should never leave your hands: NDAs, medical records, legal filings, HR documents, financial statements, tax returns. NO ACCOUNT REQUIRED Open the app. Use every feature. Close the app. No sign-up screen. No email address. No subscription prompt. No paywall on any v1.0 feature. BUILT FOR PEOPLE WHO HANDLE SENSITIVE DOCUMENTS Folio is built for lawyers, accountants, HR professionals, and anyone else who regularly works with documents that are nobody else's business — and for anyone who is simply tired of feeding their files to free websites that profit from what they read. Your documents are yours. Folio keeps them that way.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Folio at none against Elephant Folio's 2. Folio also leads on iOS requirement (17.0 vs 26.0). On price, ads and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Elephant Folio sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $4.00 per month. Folio asks for nothing beyond the download.
| Parameter | Elephant Folio | Folio |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (3 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 50.0% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 3 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 2 days | — |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, Mac — better | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 26.0 | 17.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 95 MB | 1 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Beroea Tech L.L.C | Vuyo Nkadimeng |
In-app purchases
Elephant Folio
- Monthly Subscription$4.001 Month
- Lifetime License$55.00
Folio
No in-app purchases









