Gotenberg vs Stirling-PDF
| Tagline | Developer API to convert HTML, Markdown, Word, and Excel files into PDFs | Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Notion | Notion, Confluence |
| GitHub stars | 12k | 81k |
| Language | Docker | Docker |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker Docker Compose Kubernetes | Docker Docker Compose |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 2 days ago | 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.
Gotenberg
- Conversion-only API; no storage, user interface, or document management.
- Complex CSS layouts and JavaScript-heavy pages may render inconsistently with headless Chromium.
- LibreOffice fidelity for intricate Word/Excel formatting can differ from native Office rendering.
- No built-in rate limiting or authentication — must be secured at the reverse proxy level.
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.
Gotenberg
Developer API to convert HTML, Markdown, Word, and Excel files into PDFs
Stirling-PDF
Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs