I have never had a "company laptop." I build toolz.dev, maintain the WP Adminify plugin, and ship Laravel and React work for clients I have mostly never met in person. My office is a browser and a terminal, and my teammates are scattered across enough time zones that "quick sync" is a scheduling problem. Over the years that setup taught me something specific about tooling: when you work remotely, the tool that wins is not the most powerful one. It is the one that is already open.
The heavy desktop app you have to launch, sign into, and wait for is friction. When a colleague pastes a 200-line JSON blob into Slack and you are on a call, you do not want to open a native app. You want a tab. That instinct is the whole reason toolz.dev exists, and it is also why this guide is a list of the tools I genuinely reach for during a normal working day, not a padded roundup.
I am going to be honest about the gaps too. There are things toolz.dev does not do, and I would rather tell you than have you find out mid-task. Let's go through the toolkit the way I actually use it.
TL;DR: For remote work you want tools that load instantly and process data locally so nothing leaves your machine. My daily set: JSON Formatter for reading API responses, Base64 Converter and JWT Decoder for auth debugging, Timestamp Converter and Timezone Converter for cross-zone teams, Text Diff for comparing config, and Image Compress before every screenshot upload. All free, all in-browser, no account. The one honest gap: toolz.dev has no PDF tools — I use Stirling PDF or iLovePDF for those.
Why do browser tools beat installed apps for remote work?
The answer is not "browsers are trendy." It is a few concrete advantages that only matter once you are working from a laptop that is not sitting on a corporate network.
New machines are the obvious one. I have rebuilt my working environment on a borrowed laptop more than once, usually because a drive died at the worst possible time. Every hour spent reinstalling desktop utilities is an hour not shipping. A browser tab needs zero setup. Restricted environments are the second: plenty of client machines and locked-down corporate laptops simply will not let you install software, and a web tool sidesteps that entirely. Then there is raw speed — opening a tab is faster than cold-starting a native app — and cross-platform consistency, because the same tool behaves identically on macOS, Windows, Linux, and a Chromebook.
Here is the tradeoff laid out plainly, because browser tools are not always the right call.
| Consideration | Browser tools | Installed desktop apps |
|---|---|---|
| Setup time | None — open a tab | Download, install, sign in |
| Works on a locked-down machine | Yes | Often blocked by IT |
| Large files (500MB+) | Limited by browser memory | Handles them better |
| Data privacy | Client-side tools never upload | Depends on the app |
| Deep editing (Photoshop-grade) | No | Yes |
| Offline after first load | Sometimes (cached) | Yes |
The pattern I follow: browser tools for the hundred small daily tasks, native software for the heavy, specialized work. Ninety percent of what interrupts my flow is small.
What data and API tools do I open every day?
Most of my day is moving data between shapes and reading what an API actually returned.
JSON is the constant. APIs, logs, config files, error payloads — all JSON, and half of it arrives minified into a single unreadable line. The JSON Formatter is the tab I have pinned. Paste the minified blob, get indented output, and it flags the exact position of a syntax error, which is usually a trailing comma someone left in. When I am elbow-deep in JSON I lean on the whole set covered in the ultimate guide to JSON tools.
Data crosses the spreadsheet/application boundary constantly. A client sends a CSV of records; my API wants JSON. CSV to JSON handles that direction and JSON to CSV handles the trip back for stakeholders who live in Google Sheets. One thing worth knowing before you trust the conversion blindly: the CSV to JSON tool infers types, so 07102 becomes the number 7102 and leading zeros vanish. I wrote up exactly where that bites in the CSV to JSON guide — it is the kind of quiet data corruption that ruins a migration.
Auth debugging is its own little ritual. When a request 401s and I need to see what a token actually claims, the JWT Decoder splits it into header, payload, and signature so I can check the exp and the scopes. Base64 shows up everywhere around auth too — data URIs, Basic auth headers, binary stuffed into JSON — and the Base64 Converter handles both directions. For the YAML that runs my deployments, Kubernetes manifests and CI configs, a single bad indent breaks a pipeline, so the YAML Validator catches it before the deploy does.
If your work is API-heavy, I collected the fuller set in the API debugging tools guide.
How do these tools help across time zones?
This is the part non-remote developers underestimate. When your team spans eight or ten time zones, timestamps are a genuine source of bugs and missed meetings.
Logs arrive with Unix timestamps. An incident happened at 1708876200 and I need to know when that was in my local time before I can correlate it with anything. The Timestamp Converter turns that into a human date instantly — and having verified this the hard way, that value is 2024-02-25T15:50Z, not whatever your gut says. The Timezone Converter is what I use when scheduling with people in cities I could not point to on a map without help.
The habit that actually prevents the bugs, though, is not a tool. Store everything in UTC internally, display in the user's local zone in the UI, and use ISO 8601 in every log and message so there is no ambiguity to convert in the first place. The converter is for the times someone else did not follow that rule.
Which text tools save me the most time?
Small, unglamorous, constant.
Naming conventions are a daily conversion. JavaScript wants camelCase, Python wants snake_case, constants want UPPER_CASE, URLs want kebab-case. I paste a list of database column names into the Case Converter and get property names back without hand-editing forty lines. For anything with a length limit — a meta description, a commit message, documentation with a minimum — the Word Counter gives me the count without me counting.
The Text Diff tool earns its tab. Git handles code diffs, but I am forever comparing two things git does not track: a staging config against production, an API response before and after a change, two drafts of a spec. Side by side with additions and deletions highlighted, I see the one line that differs in a second. And when I need throwaway placeholder text for a mockup, the Lorem Ipsum Generator beats copying from some random site — though fair warning, it only produces paragraphs, and its opening line is the slightly-wrong classic "Lorem ipsum odor amet," not "dolor." I dug into that quirk in the text tools guide.
One honest correction from an earlier version of this article: the String Reverse tool does character reversal only. It does not have word or line modes, whatever a previous draft claimed. And it reverses by UTF-16 code unit, which means it mangles emoji and flag characters. That is not a bug I can hand-wave — it is how naive string reversal works everywhere, and it is worth understanding if you ever reverse strings in code.
What about images and frontend work?
I contribute to frontend regularly, and screenshots are a constant byproduct of remote work — bug reports, PR context, documentation.
Unoptimized screenshots bloat repos and blow past attachment limits. I run everything through Image Compress before it goes into a GitHub issue or a Slack thread. When I need a specific size — a 1200×630 social card, a consistent doc width — Image Resize does it, and the Format Converter handles PNG/JPEG/WebP without me installing ImageMagick. A caution on that converter: it outputs PNG, JPEG, or WebP only, not AVIF, and a transparent PNG saved as JPEG composites onto black, not white, per the HTML spec. Details like that live in the image format converter guide.
The Background Remover is genuinely useful but I need to correct a common misconception, including one an earlier draft of this very guide repeated: it is not AI. It is a color-key remover. It samples the top-left pixel and deletes everything close to that color, which is perfect for a solid-color background and useless on hair or a gradient. Knowing which one you have saves you frustration.
For CSS work there is the Gradient Generator and the Color Picker. And the newest addition I lean on hard: the Color Contrast Checker, because I once shipped light-grey text that was invisible in sunlight and I never want to do it again. The full story is in the color contrast checker guide.
What coding utilities round out the set?
A handful I would not want to work without. The UUID Generator for test data and mock records. The Regex Builder for building and testing patterns against sample text before I paste them into code — regex written blind is regex that fails in production. The SQL Formatter for making a wall of query readable. The Hash Generator for checksums.
And because I spend a lot of time in WordPress, the Unserialize tool decodes the serialized blobs that live in the wp_options table. When a plugin misbehaves, its serialized settings usually tell the story faster than stepping through code — I wrote the whole approach up in the PHP unserialize guide.
What toolz.dev does NOT do
I would rather say this plainly than let a link 404 on you. toolz.dev has no PDF tools. No merge, no split, no compress, no rotate. If you land here looking to combine two PDFs, I am not going to send you to a tool that does not exist. Use Stirling PDF if you want something self-hostable and private, or iLovePDF for a quick web job. I keep those bookmarked myself.
It also is not a replacement for deep, specialized software. The image tools are for compression, resizing, and format conversion — not layer editing. For real photo work you still want Photoshop or GIMP. Browser tools cover the daily small stuff extremely well and honestly stop there.
The privacy angle actually matters for remote work
When you work from home, a café, or a coworking space, your data is crossing networks you do not control. This is where client-side processing stops being a buzzword. The tools on toolz.dev that process data do it in your browser — the file or text never leaves your machine, so there is nothing to intercept over sketchy café WiFi and nothing sitting in a server log somewhere. For handling a client's contract text or a config file full of connection strings, that is the difference between "fine" and "incident report." I went deeper on the privacy model in the data privacy tools guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are the tools on toolz.dev free?
Yes, the tools are free to use with no watermarks. To be accurate rather than salesy: there is a usage-metering system, and guests get a per-tool daily limit that rises when you register. Most people never hit it. There is no paywall on the tools themselves and no forced signup to try them.
Do the tools work offline?
Partially. The page has to load from the internet once, but because the processing happens in your browser, the actual operation does not need a live connection after that. Some tools get cached by the browser and keep working offline; it is not a guarantee across the board.
Are these tools safe for company or client data?
The tools that process data do it locally in your browser, so nothing is uploaded. That is usually safer than commercial alternatives that process on their servers, and it lines up with data policies that forbid external uploads. If you handle regulated data, still confirm against your own policy — I can tell you how the tool works, not what your compliance team allows.
Can I use them on my phone?
Yes. They are responsive and work in mobile browsers. Heavy tasks are more comfortable on a desktop, but quick jobs — formatting JSON, decoding a token, generating a UUID — are fine on a phone.
Does toolz.dev have PDF tools?
No. This is the honest gap. There are no PDF merge, split, compress, or rotate tools on the site. For those I use Stirling PDF or iLovePDF and recommend you do the same.
Is there an API for these tools?
Not currently. They are built for interactive browser use. For programmatic work, implement the operation directly in your code with the underlying open-source libraries rather than expecting a hosted endpoint.
How large a file can these tools handle?
Because processing is in-browser, the ceiling is your device's memory, not a server limit. Most modern machines handle files up to a couple hundred megabytes. For genuinely large files, a command-line tool is the better choice.
Which tools should a remote developer bookmark first?
Start with the four I open most: JSON Formatter, Base64 Converter, Timestamp Converter, and Text Diff. Add the rest as specific needs come up.
The honest conclusion
Remote work rewards a different kind of toolkit — fast, private, zero-setup — and punishes friction harder than an office does, because there is no one at the next desk to borrow a tool from. The set above is what I actually keep open, gaps and all. I would rather hand you a shorter list of tools that work exactly as described than a padded one full of things that do not exist.
Open toolz.dev, pin the four essentials, and add tools to the folder as the day throws them at you. And when you need a PDF combined, you now know where I send myself.
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