Docassemble is a free, open-source platform for guided interviews and legal document assembly, created by lawyer-programmer Jonathan Pyle in 2015.
Docassemble is a free, open-source expert-system platform for building guided interviews that present one question at a time and can generate documents, submit applications, or deliver tailored information. Created by Philadelphia lawyer-programmer Jonathan Pyle and first announced in 2015 at the Legal Services Corporation's TIG conference, it grew out of the access-to-justice community and remains widely used across legal aid organizations, courts, and law school clinics.
Despite its name, docassemble interviews do not need to produce a document at all; they can submit applications, store data, call external APIs, or simply inform the user, making the platform closer to a general guided-workflow engine than a narrow document generator.
Interviews are authored as YAML blocks combined with Python code blocks and Jinja2-style templating for document output, giving developers full programming flexibility alongside a declarative interview format. Reusable interview logic is packaged and shared via GitHub as installable Packages.
Docassemble supports local development, Docker-based deployment, and multi-server clustered configurations for scale, along with API integration for connecting interviews to external systems.
Docassemble's source code is free under the MIT license, and its documentation is available under a CC BY 3.0 license, with no cost to download, run, or modify the software. There is no official managed hosting service from the project itself.
A surrounding ecosystem of independent consultants and hosting providers offers paid implementation, customization, and hosting services built on top of the free open-source core for organizations that want professional support.
Yes. Docassemble's source code is released under the MIT license and is completely free to download, run, and modify.
Building interviews requires familiarity with YAML and basic Python, so some technical skill is generally necessary.
Interviews can submit applications, store structured data, call external APIs, or simply present information, in addition to generating Word or PDF documents.
Docassemble can be run locally or deployed via Docker to cloud providers such as AWS or DigitalOcean; there is no official managed hosting service from the project itself, though third-party providers offer hosting.
Docassemble was created by Jonathan Pyle, a Philadelphia lawyer and programmer, first announced in 2015 at the Legal Services Corporation's TIG conference.
Docassemble's code is released under the MIT license, and its documentation is released under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 3.0) license.