PDFUnit began with a customer request in August 2010, to which it was not possible to create a solution using the available tool 'jPdfUnit 1.1' (http://jpdfunit.sourceforge.net). Nor did the Apache project 'PDFBox' (http://pdfbox.apache.org) provide enough functionality. Only iText (http://itextpdf.com) provided the functions which were needed to implement the customer request.

Throughout 2011, the knowledge about PDF and iText grew until implementation of PDFUnit based on iText was begun at the end of 2011.

Though the testing tool PDFUnit reached its goal, work on other projects slowed further development of the initial version.

In early 2013, new functions were added, existing bugs were fixed and the user manuals were created.

Many small improvements led to a new version of PDFUnit-Java.

The main new feature is a graphical user interface called PDFUnit-Monitor which allows non-programmers to use PDFUnit. The monitor reads the test information from one or more Excel files.

The implementation was refactored, iText was replaced by PDFBox 2.0. New testing features were created to validate QR codes, bar codes and ZUGFeRD data. PDFUnit now supports analysis of text with the direction right-to-left, as well as tests of all PDF documents in a given folder.