Foam vs Stirling-PDF
| Tagline | VS Code extension for personal knowledge management inspired by Roam Research | Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Notion, Obsidian | Notion, Confluence |
| GitHub stars | 15k | 82k |
| Language | TypeScript | Docker |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 1/5 Effortless | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Manual | Docker Docker Compose |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 2 months 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.
Foam
- Entirely dependent on VS Code; not usable on mobile or without the editor
- No real-time multi-user collaboration features
- Plugin ecosystem is much smaller than Obsidian; fewer community extensions
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 Foam if you want the lower-effort setup; 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.
Foam
VS Code extension for personal knowledge management inspired by Roam Research
Stirling-PDF
Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs