Stirling-PDF
Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs
Overview
Stirling-PDF is a self-hosted web application that provides over 50 PDF operations — merge, split, rotate, compress, watermark, OCR, convert to/from various formats, and more — all processed locally without sending files to any external service. It uses Apache PDFBox, LibreOffice, and Tesseract under the hood and exposes a clean browser UI plus a REST API. Deployed as a single Docker container with optional LibreOffice sidecar for Office conversions. Authentication and user management are supported in the premium tier.
Where it falls short of Notion
- 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.
We list the gaps honestly so you can decide if the trade-off is worth owning your data.
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