Alternatives
Self-hosted alternatives to paperless-ngx
Projects in the registry that can run on your own hardware and serve at least one of the same use cases as paperless-ngx.
- Source
- Registry relations over fetched repository records — the evidence sits on each repository page
- Verified
- Evidence not verified
- Confidence
- High
01How this list was built
- Compared against
- paperless-ngx
- Delivery
- Self-hosted projects
- Shared use cases
- Document classification, OCR, Knowledge management, Invoice extraction
- Selection rule
- open source, or self-hostable, and shares a use case
- Candidates found
- 12
02Alternatives
AnythingLLM
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Desktop and server application that turns a document set into a chat workspace, with per-workspace embeddings, multiple model back ends and a built-in vector store.
- Repository
- Mintplex-Labs/anything-llm
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Knowledge management
Docling
Libraries
Document conversion toolkit that parses PDF, Office and image files into structured Markdown or JSON, preserving reading order, tables and figures for downstream retrieval.
- Repository
- docling-project/docling
- Stars
- 65,519
- Licence
- MIT
- In stacks
- 4
Shares: Ocr
LocalAI
Model servers
Drop-in OpenAI-compatible API server that runs text, embedding, image and audio models locally across several back ends, including CPU-only deployments.
- Repository
- mudler/LocalAI
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Ocr
n8n
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Workflow automation tool with several hundred integrations, branching logic, code steps and AI nodes. Can be self-hosted, which is why it appears in on-premise automation stacks.
- Repository
- n8n-io/n8n
- Stars
- 202,375
- Licence
- Other
- In stacks
- 4
Shares: Document classification
Onyx
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Open-source enterprise search and chat over company systems, with connectors to common SaaS tools, permission-aware indexing and a self-hosted deployment path.
- Repository
- onyx-dot-app/onyx
- Stars
- 31,754
- Licence
- Other
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Knowledge management
PaddleOCR
Libraries
OCR toolkit with detection, recognition and layout models, including Chinese and other East Asian scripts, plus table and formula recognition. Runs offline on CPU or GPU.
- Repository
- PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Ocr · Document classification
pgvector
Libraries
PostgreSQL extension adding vector types and HNSW or IVFFlat indexes, so embeddings live in the same database and the same backup as the rest of the application data.
- Repository
- pgvector/pgvector
- Stars
- 22,735
- Licence
- Other
- In stacks
- 5
Shares: Knowledge management
Qdrant
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Vector search engine written in Rust with payload filtering, hybrid search, quantisation and snapshots. Runs as a single container or a cluster, or as a managed cloud service.
- Repository
- qdrant/qdrant
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Knowledge management
RAGFlow
Self-hosted projects
Retrieval engine built around deep document parsing: layout-aware chunking of PDFs, tables and scans, citation-backed answers, and a visual pipeline for building knowledge bases.
- Repository
- infiniflow/ragflow
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 1
Shares: Knowledge management
Tesseract OCR
Libraries
Long-established open-source OCR engine with trained data for many languages and scripts, usable offline and embedded in most self-hosted document pipelines.
- Repository
- tesseract-ocr/tesseract
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Ocr · Document classification
Unstructured
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Library and hosted API that partition documents of many formats into typed elements for indexing, with connectors to common storage systems and vector databases.
- Repository
- Unstructured-IO/unstructured
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 1
Shares: Ocr
Weaviate
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Vector database with a schema model, hybrid keyword and vector search, and optional built-in vectorisation modules. Self-hosted or managed, single-tenant or multi-tenant collections.
- Repository
- weaviate/weaviate
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Knowledge management
03Repository facts
| Repository | Stars | Health |
|---|---|---|
| Mintplex-Labs/anything-llm | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| docling-project/doclingGet your documents ready for gen AI | 66k | Maintenance 100%, Releases 100%, Contributors 50%, Issues 85%, Community 96%90 |
| mudler/LocalAI | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| n8n-io/n8nFair-code workflow automation platform with native AI capabilities. Combine visual building with custom code, self-host or cloud, 400+ integrations. | 202k | Maintenance 100%, Releases 100%, Contributors 50%, Issues 95%, Community 100%92 |
| onyx-dot-app/onyxOpen Source AI Platform - AI Chat with advanced features that works with every LLM | 32k | Maintenance 100%, Releases 100%, Contributors 50%, Issues 87%, Community 90%89 |
| PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| pgvector/pgvectorOpen-source vector similarity search for Postgres | 23k | Maintenance 100%, Releases 30%, Contributors 50%, Issues 99%, Community 87%75 |
| qdrant/qdrant | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| infiniflow/ragflow | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| tesseract-ocr/tesseract | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| Unstructured-IO/unstructured | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| weaviate/weaviate | — | Health not measuredunknown |
04Ask about your own case
Which alternative is right depends on how many people will use it, what the data is and what you can operate. Ask and the answer is researched for your organisation.