Logseq vs Stirling-PDF
| Tagline | Privacy-first, local-first outliner for networked notes | Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Obsidian, Notion, Evernote | Notion, Confluence |
| GitHub stars | 44k | 88k |
| Language | Clojure | Docker |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 4/5 Involved | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Manual | Docker Docker Compose |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 2 days ago | 3 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.
Logseq
- Primarily a local desktop app; there is no official self-hosted web server, only file sync via Git/cloud storage.
- Official sync service is paid and separate from the open-source core.
- The database-backed rewrite has had a long, disruptive transition.
- Mobile apps are less polished and sync can be tricky.
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 Stirling-PDF if you want the lower-effort setup; choose Stirling-PDF for the larger community and ecosystem. Logseq 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