Stirling-PDF vs TiddlyWiki
| Tagline | Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs | Reusable non-linear personal web notebook for capturing and organizing ideas |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Notion, Confluence | Notion, Evernote, Obsidian |
| GitHub stars | 81k | 8.6k |
| Language | Docker | Nodejs |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker Docker Compose | Manual Docker |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | today | 9 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.
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.
TiddlyWiki
- No built-in real-time collaboration; multi-user editing requires workarounds
- UI feels dated compared to modern tools like Notion; steeper learning curve for non-technical users
- Mobile editing experience is limited and not optimized
- No built-in database views (kanban, gallery, table) found in Notion
Bottom line
Both are a similar lift to self-host; choose Stirling-PDF for the larger community and ecosystem. Stirling-PDF 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
TiddlyWiki
Reusable non-linear personal web notebook for capturing and organizing ideas