How to Export a Signal Chat to PDF or Text

Why Signal doesn’t offer an export button

Signal's whole design is oriented around messages living only on your devices, encrypted, with as little persistent, exportable structure as possible. That's a deliberate privacy trade-off, not an oversight — but it does mean the tools for reading your own history are all built by the community, not Signal itself.

Signal Desktop: signal-export

If you have Signal Desktop linked to your account, this is by far the most practical route. signal-export (command-line tool, package name sigexport) reads Signal Desktop's local database and writes out readable files.

1. Close Signal Desktop before running the tool — it needs the local database file to not be locked by the running app.
2. Install it, typically with pipx install signal-export.
3. Run it: sigexport ~/signal-chats exports every conversation into that folder.
4. The tool writes one markdown or text file per chat, with media saved into accompanying folders.

This is the method to use if it's available to you — it's free, reads directly from your own device, and produces a complete, readable transcript with media.

Android: possible, but genuinely difficult

Android's Signal Backup (a .backup file) is encrypted with a 30-digit passphrase that Signal shows you once, at backup-creation time. Reading it requires a specialist tool called signalbackup-tools, and you must have that 30-digit passphrase — there's no way around it if you've lost it, by design, since the whole point of the passphrase is that Signal itself cannot recover it for you. This route is realistic if you deliberately made a backup and kept the passphrase somewhere safe; it is not a quick option otherwise, and there is no shortcut around a lost passphrase.

iPhone: only through a linked desktop

iOS gives you no direct export path at all. The only practical route is to link an iPhone's Signal account to Signal Desktop first (Signal's own device-linking feature, used normally to run Signal on a computer alongside your phone), let the conversations sync to the desktop app, and then run signal-export against that desktop installation as described above.

A low-tech alternative for just a few messages

If you only need a handful of specific messages rather than a full conversation history, you don't necessarily need any tool at all. Signal lets you forward individual messages to another chat (including a note-to-self conversation) or copy the text directly, which is enough for a small number of messages you can identify by hand. It doesn't scale to a long conversation and it won't preserve the same structured timestamps as a proper export, but it's a legitimate option when the full-export tools above are more than you need.

Being honest about the difficulty

Compared to WhatsApp's one-tap Export Chat or Telegram Desktop's built-in export, getting data out of Signal takes real effort: installing a command-line tool, or tracking down a 30-digit passphrase you may not have saved. If you expect to need a Signal conversation later — for your own records or something more formal — it's worth setting up Signal Desktop and running an export now, before you actually need it under time pressure.

From export to PDF

Once you have the markdown/text files and media folder from signal-export, drop them into ChatViewer to read the conversation as proper bubbles with photos inline, full-text search and statistics — processed entirely in your browser, nothing uploaded. Then Export PDF: free for the first 500 messages with a small watermark, $9 for the complete conversation with no watermark, or $19 for a court-ready version with Bates stamps and a SHA-256 integrity hash.