AFFiNE vs Stirling-PDF
| Tagline | Privacy-first, local-first workspace combining docs, whiteboards, and databases | Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Notion, Confluence, Obsidian | Notion, Confluence |
| GitHub stars | 70k | 81k |
| Language | TypeScript | Docker |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 3/5 Moderate | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker Docker Compose | Docker Docker Compose |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | today | today |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
AFFiNE
- Self-hosted real-time sync (AFFiNE Cloud) has historically lagged the desktop/local experience and can be fiddly to configure.
- Smaller third-party integration and plugin ecosystem than Notion.
- Mobile apps are less mature than the desktop client.
- Some advanced AI and collaboration features are gated to the paid cloud tier.
Stirling-PDF
- Not a document-management or collaboration tool — purely a PDF processing utility.
- Advanced features like user auth and SSO require the paid Stirling-PDF Pro license.
- No document storage or versioning; files must be uploaded and downloaded manually each session.
- OCR accuracy depends on Tesseract language packs installed in the container.
Bottom line
Choose Stirling-PDF if you want the lower-effort setup; choose Stirling-PDF for the larger community and ecosystem. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.
AFFiNE
Privacy-first, local-first workspace combining docs, whiteboards, and databases
Stirling-PDF
Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs