Docusaurus vs Stirling-PDF
| Tagline | React-powered static site generator optimised for documentation portals | 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 | 56k | 82k |
| Language | TypeScript | Docker |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Manual Docker | Docker Docker Compose |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 19 days ago | 5 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.
Docusaurus
- Static build; no CMS-style in-browser editing for non-developers
- Versioning system adds complexity for teams not already using Git workflows
- No built-in search without configuring Algolia DocSearch or a local plugin
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
Both are a similar lift to self-host; choose Stirling-PDF for the larger community and ecosystem. Stirling-PDF has seen more recent development. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.
Docusaurus
React-powered static site generator optimised for documentation portals
Stirling-PDF
Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs