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.
Overview
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) |
Use Cases
Choose Paperless-ngx For...
- Going paperless — scan and archive all your documents
- Finding documents by content ("show me all invoices from 2025")
- Automatic organization with ML-powered tagging
- Email attachment processing
- Long-term document storage and retrieval
Choose Stirling-PDF For...
- Merging multiple PDFs into one
- Splitting a PDF into pages
- Converting Word/Excel/images to/from PDF
- Adding watermarks or signatures
- Compressing large PDFs
- One-off PDF manipulation without installing software
Use Both Together
The ideal setup: Paperless-ngx as your document archive + Stirling-PDF for quick manipulation tasks. Process a PDF in Stirling, then drop it into Paperless for archiving.
Final Verdict
Not a competition. Paperless-ngx manages your documents. Stirling-PDF manipulates PDFs. Run both.
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