draw.io vs Stirling-PDF
| Tagline | Powerful open-source diagramming tool for flowcharts, UML, ER, and network diagrams | 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 | 6.2k | 81k |
| Language | Javascript | Docker |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker Manual | Docker Docker Compose |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | yesterday | 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.
draw.io
- No real-time multi-cursor collaboration in the self-hosted version (available only on draw.io cloud)
- Version history and branching are not built-in; rely on external storage integration
- Limited commenting and review workflow compared to Lucidchart or Miro
- No presentation mode or interactive slideshow features
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.
draw.io
Powerful open-source diagramming tool for flowcharts, UML, ER, and network diagrams
Stirling-PDF
Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs