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Paperless-ngx

Scan, index, and archive paper documents with full-text search and AI tagging

Replaces
Evernote
47k Python GPL-3.0 today

Overview

Paperless-ngx is a document management system that ingests scanned documents and PDFs, runs OCR via Tesseract, extracts text, and makes everything searchable through a modern web UI. It auto-classifies documents by assigning correspondents, document types, and tags using a built-in machine learning model trained on your archive. Storage backends include local disk and S3-compatible object storage. It is a community-maintained fork of the original Paperless project and deploys via Docker Compose with PostgreSQL and Redis.

Where it falls short of Evernote

  • Primarily a document archive, not a note-taking or collaboration tool.
  • Mobile scanning requires a third-party app (e.g., Scanbot) pointing at the consume folder.
  • No real-time collaboration or shared editing of documents.
  • Initial OCR processing of large backlogs can be slow and CPU-intensive.

We list the gaps honestly so you can decide if the trade-off is worth owning your data.

Tags

document-management
ocr
archiving
search
paperless
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