Paperless-ngx

What is Paperless-ngx?

Paperless-ngx is a document management system (DMS) that turns your physical paper and PDFs into a searchable digital archive. You scan or drop in a file, and it runs OCR, extracts the text, and lets you organize it with tags, correspondents, and document types — then find it later with full-text search. It’s the community-maintained successor to the original Paperless and Paperless-ng.

What is Paperless-ngx best for?

People who want a private, searchable home for bills, receipts, contracts, tax records, and letters — without mailing them through a cloud service. It’s a natural fit for homelab and self-hosting enthusiasts, families sharing a household archive, and developers who want to script against a real REST API. It’s the flagship open source document management system.

What can Paperless-ngx do?

• OCR scans and PDFs with the Tesseract engine in 100+ languages, saving a searchable PDF/A next to the original
• Organize documents with tags, correspondents, document types, storage paths, and custom fields
• Auto-classify new documents by learning your existing tags with a built-in machine-learning classifier
• Full-text search with auto-completion, relevance ranking, and a “more like this” similarity finder
• Ingest documents automatically from a watched consume folder or from email inbox attachments
• Automate handling with rule-based workflows, and script anything through a complete REST API
• Give multiple users global or per-document permissions, and share documents via public links with optional expiry

Where does Paperless-ngx fall short?

• Automatic tagging is weak until it’s trained. The built-in Naive Bayes classifier needs hundreds of hand-tagged documents before its suggestions get reliable, so expect a lot of manual tagging in the first month.
• Search runs on Whoosh, which handles keyword search across a few thousand documents fine but lacks the fuzzy matching and faceted filtering of Elasticsearch once an archive grows very large.
• It stores your documents unencrypted on disk, so the project explicitly warns against running it on an untrusted host — it’s designed for a local server you control, not a shared or public VPS.
• Phone capture is a weak spot: the web UI is responsive but isn’t a good scanning surface, so most people pair it with a separate community mobile app to snap documents on the go.

Is Paperless-ngx free?

Yes — Paperless-ngx is fully free and open source under the GPL-3.0 license, with no paid tier, seat license, or hosted upsell. You only pay for the hardware it runs on. There’s no official managed cloud, so any hosted offering comes from third parties, and the maintainers fund the project through donations.

What does Paperless-ngx replace?

Paperless-ngx is a self-hosted alternative to commercial document management suites like DocuWare and M-Files. It covers the core capture-index-search-archive job those products do — OCR, metadata tagging, and full-text search — without per-seat licensing or storing your records in a vendor’s cloud. It’s aimed at personal and small-team archives rather than large enterprises with heavy compliance and approval-workflow needs.

FAQ

Is Paperless-ngx open source? Yes. It’s licensed under GPL-3.0 and developed in the open on GitHub as the community successor to the original Paperless and Paperless-ng projects.

Can I self-host Paperless-ngx for free? Yes. The software is free; you only pay for your own server. The standard install is a Docker Compose stack that runs on hardware as small as a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB of RAM.

Is Paperless-ngx a good DocuWare alternative? For individuals and small teams, yes — you get OCR, tagging, and full-text search without per-user cloud fees. Large enterprises that need advanced compliance and approval workflows may still prefer a commercial DMS.

What do I need to run Paperless-ngx? Docker with about 2 GB of RAM (4 GB recommended), plus a database (PostgreSQL, MariaDB, or SQLite) and Redis. Optional Tika and Gotenberg containers add support for Office documents.