Docs vs Stirling-PDF
| Tagline | Scalable collaborative wiki and documentation platform by La Suite Numérique | Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Notion, Confluence | Notion, Confluence |
| GitHub stars | 17k | 92k |
| Language | K8S | Docker |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 4/5 Involved | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Kubernetes Docker Compose Manual | Docker Docker Compose |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | yesterday | yesterday |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
Docs
- Relatively young project; ecosystem of integrations (plugins, API clients) is still maturing.
- Database and storage setup requires external PostgreSQL and object-storage configuration.
- No native mobile app; browser-only.
- Feature parity with Notion (databases, kanban, formulas) is not yet reached.
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.
Stirling-PDF
Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs