BookStack vs Stirling-PDF
| Tagline | Simple, self-hosted documentation and wiki platform | Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Confluence, Notion | Notion, Confluence |
| GitHub stars | 19k | 88k |
| Language | PHP | Docker |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 3/5 Moderate | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker Docker Compose Manual | Docker Docker Compose |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 2 days ago | 3 days ago |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
BookStack
- Fixed Books/Chapters/Pages hierarchy is rigid versus Notion's free-form structure.
- No real-time collaborative editing.
- No database/table views or relational content.
- Plugin/extension ecosystem is minimal.
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. BookStack has seen more recent development. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.
Stirling-PDF
Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs