Best self-hosted Document Management apps

A document management system (DMS) is a system used to receive, track, manage and store documents and reduce paper.

17 open source Document Management tools you host on your own server — with full control of your data and no per-user cost.

Stirling-PDF

★ 82,894

Stirling-PDF is a Swiss-army knife for PDFs running in the browser via your own server: merge, split, compress, convert, sign and OCR. It replaces online PDF sites without uploading sensitive documents to third parties.

Document Management Apache-2.0

Paperless-ngx

★ 42,365

Paperless-ngx digitizes, indexes and organizes all your paper documents, with OCR and full-text search. Self-hosted, it becomes a fully private paperless archive, with tags and automatic matching.

Document ManagementArchiving and Digital Preservation (DP) GPL-3.0

Docuseal

★ 17,261

Create, fill, and sign digital documents (alternative to DocuSign).

Document Management AGPL-3.0

BentoPDF

★ 13,836

Powerful, privacy-first, client-side PDF toolkit that allows you to manipulate, edit, merge, and process PDF files directly in your browser.

Document Management AGPL-3.0

Documenso

★ 13,514

Digital document signing platform (alternative to DocuSign).

Document Management AGPL-3.0

Gotenberg

★ 12,446

Developer-friendly API to interact with powerful tools like Chromium and LibreOffice for converting numerous document formats (HTML, Markdown, Word, Excel, etc.) into PDF files, and more.

Document ManagementAutomation MIT

OpenSign

★ 6,549

Document signing software (alternative to DocuSign).

Document Management AGPL-3.0

Papra

★ 4,837

Minimalist document storage, management and archiving platform designed to be simple to use and accessible to everyone.

Document ManagementArchiving and Digital Preservation (DP) AGPL-3.0

Docspell

★ 2,262

Auto-tagging document organizer and archive.

Document Management GPL-3.0

PdfDing

★ 1,722

PDF manager, viewer and editor offering a seamless user experience on multiple devices. It's designed to be minimal, fast, and easy to set up using Docker.

Document Management AGPL-3.0

Signature PDF

★ 801

Sign and manipulate PDFs with collaboration, organization, compression and metadata editing.

Document Management AGPL-3.0

Mayan EDMS

★ 673

Electronic document management system for your documents with preview generation, OCR, and automatic categorization among other features.

Document Management GPL-2.0

Papermerge

★ 506

Document management system focused on scanned documents (electronic archives). Features file browsing in similar way to dropbox/google drive. OCR, full text search, text overlay/selection.

Document Management Apache-2.0

EveryDocs

★ 372

Simple Document Management System for private use with basic functionality to organize your documents digitally.

Document Management GPL-3.0

I, Librarian

★ 341

Organize PDF papers and office documents. It provides a lot of extra features for students and research groups both in industry and academia.

Document Management GPL-3.0

SimpleDMS

★ 145

Easy-to-use, metadata-driven, open-source document management system (DMS) for small businesses that sorts documents almost by itself.

Document Management AGPL-3.0

SeedDMS

Document Management System with workflows, access rights, fulltext search, and more.

Document Management GPL-2.0

Frequently asked questions

What are the best self-hosted Document Management tools?

Among the 17 options, the most popular include Stirling-PDF, Paperless-ngx, Docuseal. Compare license, platform and popularity in the list below.

Is there a free open source alternative for Document Management?

Yes — all 17 tools on this page are open source and you run them on your own server, with no monthly fee.

Where can I host a Document Management app?

On a home server (homelab) or a cheap VPS from ~€4/mo. See the suggestions on this page.