Paperless-ngx vs Stirling-PDF: Which to Use?
Published: (March 8, 2026 at 11:01 PM EDT)
2 min read
Source: Dev.to
Source: Dev.to
Quick Verdict
These aren’t competitors — they’re complementary tools. Paperless-ngx is a document management system (store, organize, search, OCR). Stirling‑PDF is a PDF toolbox (merge, split, convert, edit). Use Paperless-ngx to manage your documents. Use Stirling‑PDF to manipulate them. Most people should run both.
- Paperless-ngx scans, OCRs, tags, and archives documents into a searchable library.
- Stirling‑PDF provides 50+ PDF manipulation operations through a web UI.
One is an archive; the other is a tool.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Paperless-ngx | Stirling‑PDF |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Document archive & management | PDF manipulation toolkit |
| OCR | Yes (Tesseract, automatic) | Yes (on‑demand) |
| Auto‑tagging | Yes (ML‑based) | No |
| Full‑text search | Yes | No |
| Document storage | Yes (persistent archive) | No (processes then discards) |
| Merge/split PDFs | No | Yes |
| Convert formats | No (imports only) | Yes (DOCX↔PDF, images↔PDF, etc.) |
| PDF editing | No | Yes (rotate, watermark, metadata) |
| Email consumption | Yes (IMAP) | No |
| Barcode scanning | Yes (document separation) | No |
| API | Yes (REST) | Yes (REST) |
| Database | PostgreSQL | None (stateless) |
| Docker services | 3 (app, PostgreSQL, Redis) | 1 |
| RAM usage | 300 MB – 2 GB (OCR) | 150 MB – 1 GB (conversion) |
Typical Use Cases
- Going paperless: scan and archive all your documents
- Finding documents by content (e.g., “show me all invoices from 2025”)
- Automatic organization with ML‑powered tagging
- Email attachment processing
- Long‑term document storage and retrieval
- Merging multiple PDFs into one
- Splitting a PDF into individual pages
- Converting Word/Excel/images to/from PDF
- Adding watermarks or signatures
- Compressing large PDFs
- One‑off PDF manipulation without installing software
Ideal Setup
Use Paperless‑ngx as your central document archive and Stirling‑PDF for quick manipulation tasks. Process a PDF in Stirling‑PDF, then drop it into Paperless‑ngx for archiving.
Not a competition. Paperless‑ngx manages your documents; Stirling‑PDF manipulates PDFs. Running both gives you a complete, self‑hosted solution.