Paperless-ngx is a community-maintained, open-source document management system that scans, OCRs and indexes your paper into a searchable archive you fully own. After v2 it has become the de facto self-hosted replacement for Evernote, Dropbox Paper and paid DMS tools.
Paperless-ngx is an open-source, self-hosted document management system that ingests your scans and PDFs, runs OCR in 100+ languages, and builds a fully searchable, tagged archive you control end-to-end. We rate it 90/100 — for anyone with a flatbed scanner or a mountain of PDFs, Paperless-ngx in 2026 is the gold standard for going paperless without renting space in someone else's cloud.
Paperless-ngx is the third generation of a lineage that started in 2017, when Daniel Quinn released the original Paperless to scratch his own invoice-archive itch. In 2019, Jonas Winkler rewrote it on Django as Paperless-ng to modernize the stack and UI. When Winkler became inactive in late 2021, a rotating crew of maintainers — led today by @shamoon, @stumpylog, @bauerj and others — forked it on into Paperless-ngx. That community-governed model is why the project is still shipping: the latest release, v2.20.14 on April 14, 2026, landed as a 7-bug maintenance release, and the repo sits at 39.1k GitHub stars with 2.5k forks under the GPL-3.0 license.
The problem it solves is narrow and specific: physical paper (and the PDFs that pile up on your Downloads folder) is unsearchable, unorganized and unbackupable. Paperless-ngx turns a pile of tax returns, leases, warranties, and utility bills into a Gmail-for-documents — OCR'd, tagged, searchable and backed up wherever you want.
Cmd+F works as it should.consume directory pattern is how most people ingest in production.more_like:doc_id operator is a low-key killer feature for finding contract duplicates.{{ created_year }}/{{ correspondent }}/{{ title }}), and the database is plain PostgreSQL — back it up with restic, borg, rsync, or S3.
Sentiment across r/selfhosted, r/homelab and Hacker News is overwhelmingly positive, with one XDA review calling it "the gold standard for self-hosted document management" and several 2026 Reddit threads flagging it as the first self-hosted productivity app non-technical family members will actually use. The most-upvoted praise points are consistent: the OCR quality rivals paid DMS tools, auto-classification becomes uncannily accurate after 100–200 documents, and the web UI is fast even on a Raspberry Pi 4.
The recurring complaints are equally consistent and worth taking seriously. First, data is stored unencrypted at rest — the project's own docs bluntly say "Paperless-ngx should never be run on an untrusted host," which rules out most shared VPS setups without full-disk encryption. Second, there is no official mobile app; users rely on third-party Android clients like Paperless Mobile and iOS clients like Paperless Share, both of which work well but lag behind the web UI on new features. Third, the Docker Compose-only install path is a genuine barrier — there is no bare-metal installer, no one-click NAS package for most brands, and the stack (PostgreSQL, Redis, Tika, Gotenberg, the app container) is heavier than newcomers expect on first boot.
Paperless-ngx is free and open-source under the GPL-3.0 license. There is no commercial edition, no seat limit, and no cloud-hosted version from the core team. Your only costs are self-hosting costs and optional donations.
| Option | Price | What You Get |
|---|---|---|
| Self-host (software) | $0/month | Full app under GPL-3.0 — unlimited documents, users, custom fields, workflows |
| Typical home setup | ~$150–$400 one-time + ~$3/mo electricity | A Raspberry Pi 5 or mini-PC with a 1–2 TB SSD handles a household for years |
| Managed hosting (third party) | From ~$19/mo | Providers like Elestio and PikaPods run Paperless-ngx for you with backups |
| Support the project | Voluntary | GitHub Sponsors — funds maintainer time and infrastructure |
Best for: Households drowning in paperwork, freelancers and consultants who need a searchable client-document archive, small accounting/legal practices that can't send client docs to a US cloud vendor, and homelab users already running Docker on a NAS or mini-PC.
Not ideal for: People who just want a fancy file explorer (the setup curve is real), anyone without backup discipline (there is no cloud safety net — if your disk dies, your docs die), users on a shared VPS they don't control, and teams that need a polished mobile-first experience out of the box.
Pros:
Cons:
Docspell is a strong self-hosted alternative with stronger NLP for German-language invoices; Teedy (formerly Sismics Docs) is simpler to set up but has much weaker OCR and auto-tagging. On the paid cloud side, Evernote, DEVONthink (Mac-only) and M-Files are the serious comparisons — all of them charge $8–$30/user/month and send your documents to someone else's servers. For pure PDF organization without OCR automation, our Obsidian review covers a reference-style alternative that pairs well with Paperless-ngx as a notes layer.
Yes — if you have paper. Paperless-ngx is the rare self-hosted tool that is objectively better than its paid alternatives on the core job (search quality, auto-classification, total cost of ownership over 5+ years), and it only loses on UX polish and mobile. If you are already running a homelab or a NAS, this is a no-brainer install that will save you hundreds of dollars a year versus Evernote, DEVONthink or a paid DMS, and it will survive any single-vendor lock-in. The 90/100 rating is held back only by the lack of first-party mobile apps and at-rest encryption — two things that keep it out of "perfect" territory for commercial or compliance-heavy use.
PAPERLESS_OCR_LANGUAGE environment variable.demo/demo. Do not upload real documents — it is reset frequently.
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