Stirling-PDF vs XWiki
| Tagline | Locally hosted web app for merging, splitting, converting, and OCR-ing PDFs | Enterprise wiki platform with structured data, scripting, and extensibility |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Notion, Confluence | Confluence, Notion |
| GitHub stars | 82k | 1.1k |
| Language | Docker | Java |
| License | Apache-2.0 | LGPL-2.1 |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 4/5 Involved |
| Deploy options | Docker Docker Compose | Docker Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 5 days ago | 1 month 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.
XWiki
- JVM memory footprint is heavy; needs 1-2 GB RAM minimum for comfortable operation
- UI feels dated compared to modern Confluence or Notion interfaces
- Initial setup and Tomcat configuration have a steep learning curve for non-Java admins
Bottom line
Choose Stirling-PDF if you want the lower-effort setup; 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