Paperless-ngx vs Stirling-PDF
| Tagline | Scan, index, and archive paper documents with full-text search and AI tagging | Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Evernote, Notion | Notion, Confluence |
| GitHub stars | 42k | 81k |
| Language | Python | Docker |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 3/5 Moderate | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker Docker Compose | Docker Docker Compose |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | today | 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.
Paperless-ngx
- 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.
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. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.
Paperless-ngx
Scan, index, and archive paper documents with full-text search and AI tagging
Stirling-PDF
Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs