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
- 16
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
- 65,673
- Licence
- MIT
- 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
- 5
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
- 49,166
- Licence
- MIT
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Ocr
Marker
Libraries
PDF-to-Markdown converter aimed at long documents, with optional model-assisted correction. Published under a licence with a revenue condition — read it before commercial use.
- Repository
- datalab-to/marker
- Stars
- 39,841
- Licence
- Apache-2.0
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Ocr
MinerU
Libraries
Converts PDFs to structured Markdown or JSON, keeping reading order, tables and formulae. Handles Chinese layouts, which most Western-trained parsers do poorly.
- Repository
- opendatalab/MinerU
- Stars
- 80,242
- Licence
- Other
- 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
olmOCR
Libraries
Vision-language OCR pipeline from AI2 for turning page images into linearised text at scale, with the model weights published alongside the toolkit.
- Repository
- allenai/olmocr
- Stars
- 19,631
- Licence
- Apache-2.0
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Ocr
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
- 88,941
- Licence
- Apache-2.0
- 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
- 6
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
- 34,678
- Licence
- Apache-2.0
- 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
- 90,113
- Licence
- Apache-2.0
- In stacks
- 1
Shares: Knowledge management
scikit-learn
Libraries
The standard Python library for classical machine learning: regression, classification, clustering, preprocessing pipelines and model evaluation on tabular data.
- Repository
- scikit-learn/scikit-learn
- Stars
- 67,301
- Licence
- BSD-3-Clause
- In stacks
- 1
Shares: Document classification
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
- 76,569
- Licence
- Apache-2.0
- 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
- 15,454
- Licence
- Apache-2.0
- 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
- 16,824
- Licence
- Other
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Knowledge management
03Repository facts
| Repository | Stars | Health |
|---|---|---|
| Mintplex-Labs/anything-llmStop renting your intelligence. Own it with AnythingLLM. Everything you need for a powerful local-first agent experience | 66k | Maintenance 60%, Releases 60%, Contributors 50%, Issues 95%, Community 96%71 |
| docling-project/doclingGet your documents ready for gen AI | 66k | Maintenance 60%, Releases 60%, Contributors 50%, Issues 85%, Community 96%70 |
| mudler/LocalAILocalAI is the open-source AI engine. Run any model - LLMs, vision, voice, image, video - on any hardware. No GPU required. | 49k | Maintenance 80%, Releases 80%, Contributors 50%, Issues 97%, Community 94%81 |
| datalab-to/markerConvert PDF to markdown + JSON quickly with high accuracy | 40k | Maintenance 60%, Releases 60%, Contributors 50%, Issues 88%, Community 92%69 |
| opendatalab/MinerUTransforms complex documents like PDFs and Office docs into LLM-ready markdown/JSON for your Agentic workflows. | 80k | Maintenance 80%, Releases 80%, Contributors 50%, Issues 99%, Community 98%82 |
| 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 60%, Releases 60%, Contributors 50%, Issues 95%, Community 100%72 |
| allenai/olmocrToolkit for linearizing PDFs for LLM datasets/training | 20k | Maintenance 20%, Releases 20%, Contributors 50%, Issues 95%, Community 86%49 |
| onyx-dot-app/onyxOpen Source AI Platform - AI Chat with advanced features that works with every LLM | 32k | Maintenance 60%, Releases 60%, Contributors 50%, Issues 87%, Community 90%69 |
| PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCRTurn any PDF or image document into structured data for your AI. A powerful, lightweight OCR toolkit that bridges the gap between images/PDFs and LLMs. Supports 100+ languages. | 89k | Maintenance 60%, Releases 40%, Contributors 50%, Issues 97%, Community 99%68 |
| pgvector/pgvectorOpen-source vector similarity search for Postgres | 23k | Maintenance 60%, Releases 30%, Contributors 50%, Issues 99%, Community 87%63 |
| qdrant/qdrantQdrant - High-performance, massive-scale Vector Database and Vector Search Engine for the next generation of AI. Also available in the cloud https://cloud.qdrant.io/ | 35k | Maintenance 80%, Releases 60%, Contributors 50%, Issues 79%, Community 91%74 |
| infiniflow/ragflowRAGFlow is a leading open-source Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) engine that fuses cutting-edge RAG with Agent capabilities to create a superior context layer for LLMs | 90k | Maintenance 60%, Releases 60%, Contributors 50%, Issues 82%, Community 99%71 |
| scikit-learn/scikit-learnscikit-learn: machine learning in Python | 67k | Maintenance 80%, Releases 60%, Contributors 50%, Issues 68%, Community 97%74 |
| tesseract-ocr/tesseractTesseract Open Source OCR Engine (main repository) | 77k | Maintenance 60%, Releases 60%, Contributors 50%, Issues 94%, Community 98%71 |
| Unstructured-IO/unstructuredConvert documents to structured data effortlessly. Unstructured is open-source ETL solution for transforming complex documents into clean, structured formats for language models. Visit our website to learn more about our enterprise grade Platform product for production grade workflows, partitioning, enrichments, chunking and embedding. | 15k | Maintenance 60%, Releases 60%, Contributors 50%, Issues 80%, Community 84%66 |
| weaviate/weaviateWeaviate is an open-source vector database that stores both objects and vectors, allowing for the combination of vector search with structured filtering with the fault tolerance and scalability of a cloud-native database. | 17k | Maintenance 80%, Releases 60%, Contributors 50%, Issues 56%, Community 85%70 |
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.