Paperless-ngx is a free, self-hosted document management system with OCR and full-text search. See features, setup basics and alternatives for 2026.
Paperless-ngx is a free, open-source, self-hosted document management system licensed under GPL-3.0, with more than 43,000 stars on GitHub. It is a community-maintained fork created in early 2022 after the earlier Paperless-ng project's original maintainer stepped back.
The lineage traces back further: the original Paperless project was created by Daniel Quinn around 2017, then rewritten into Paperless-ng by Jonas Winkler in 2019, before the community forked it into Paperless-ngx to spread maintenance across a team of contributors.
Paperless-ngx watches a consume folder, or accepts uploads by web, email or mobile app, then automatically runs OCR on incoming documents and uses machine-learning-assisted classification to suggest tags, correspondents, document types and dates.
All OCR'd text is fully searchable through the web interface, and the system supports document versioning, a REST API for automation, and multi-user access, all while running entirely on infrastructure the user controls.
Paperless-ngx is completely free and open source, with no subscription fee or paid tier. There are no vendor licensing costs because anyone can self-host it using the publicly available source code and Docker images.
The real cost of running Paperless-ngx is infrastructure and time: users need a server, NAS or cloud VM to host it, along with ongoing responsibility for backups, updates and securing the deployment, since it is not offered as a managed SaaS product by its maintainers.
A free, open-source, self-hosted document management system for scanning, OCR and archiving documents.
Yes, it is fully open source under the GPL-3.0 license with no cost.
Yes, it runs on your own server, NAS or cloud VM, typically via Docker Compose.
No, Paperless-ngx is a community-maintained fork of Paperless-ng, created in 2022 after the original maintainer stepped back from active development.
Yes, it automatically OCRs ingested documents and indexes the extracted text for full-text search.
The maintainers recommend against it, since documents are stored unencrypted by default and it should only run on a trusted, secured host.
Both are open-source, self-hosted document management tools; Paperless-ngx focuses on lightweight simplicity for individuals and small teams, while Papermerge emphasizes multi-user permissions and an API-first design.
Yes, documents can be added via companion mobile apps and email ingestion.