Stirling-PDF vs Trilium Notes
| Tagline | Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs | Hierarchical note-taking app for building personal knowledge bases |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Notion, Confluence | Evernote, Obsidian, Notion |
| GitHub stars | 88k | 37k |
| Language | Docker | TypeScript |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker Docker Compose | Docker Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 3 days ago | 2 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.
Trilium Notes
- Single-user oriented; no real-time multi-user collaboration.
- UI is dense and has a steep learning curve.
- No relational database/board views like Notion.
- Original Trilium is archived; users must migrate to the community TriliumNext fork.
Bottom line
Both are a similar lift to self-host; choose Stirling-PDF for the larger community and ecosystem. Trilium Notes 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