Livebook vs Stirling-PDF
| Tagline | Collaborative Elixir notebooks with live code execution, Mermaid diagrams, and TeX | 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 | 5.8k | 81k |
| Language | Elixir | 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.
Livebook
- Exclusively supports Elixir; no Python, R, or Julia kernels unlike Jupyter
- Not a general-purpose note-taking tool — unsuitable as a Notion replacement for non-developers
- No persistent database-style pages, kanban boards, or project management views
- Community plugin ecosystem is smaller than Jupyter's
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.
Livebook
Collaborative Elixir notebooks with live code execution, Mermaid diagrams, and TeX
Stirling-PDF
Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs