Stirling-PDF vs Wiki.js
| Tagline | Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs | Modern, powerful, self-hosted wiki built on Node.js |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Notion, Confluence | Confluence, Notion |
| GitHub stars | 88k | 29k |
| Language | Docker | JavaScript |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 3/5 Moderate |
| Deploy options | Docker Docker Compose | Docker Docker Compose Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 3 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.
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.
Wiki.js
- No real-time collaborative editing.
- No database/table views or relational content.
- The long-awaited 3.x rewrite has been slow and partly unstable.
- Requires a separate database (Postgres/MySQL) to be configured.
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.
Stirling-PDF
Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs