SiYuan vs Stirling-PDF
| Tagline | Privacy-first personal knowledge management with block-level editing | Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Notion, Obsidian, Evernote | Notion, Confluence |
| GitHub stars | 45k | 88k |
| Language | TypeScript | Docker |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker 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.
SiYuan
- Primarily single-user; no real-time team collaboration.
- Official cloud sync and some features require a paid subscription.
- Documentation and UI are translated from Chinese and can be uneven.
- Smaller English-language community and plugin ecosystem.
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. SiYuan 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