Focalboard vs Stirling-PDF
| Tagline | Self-hosted project management boards (Trello/Notion alternative) | Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs |
| Category | Project Management & Kanban | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Trello, Asana, Notion | Notion, Confluence |
| GitHub stars | 26k | 92k |
| Language | TypeScript | Docker |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker Manual | Docker Docker Compose |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 4 months ago | 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.
Focalboard
- The standalone project is archived; active development moved into Mattermost Boards.
- Fewer power-ups/automations than Trello.
- No relational databases like Notion.
- Limited integrations.
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.
Stirling-PDF
Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs