Paperless-ngx is a self-hosted document management system that transforms physical and digital documents into a searchable, indexed online archive. Deployed via Docker Compose with an automated install script, the system provides OCR capabilities and stores information in clear text, requiring operation on a trusted host.
Project overview
Serves as the official community-supported successor to Paperless and Paperless-ng, offering an automated installation path to create a searchable document archive.
Project type
Document Processing
Use cases
Documents & Office
Deployment
Refer to project documentation
License
GPL-3.0
Best for
General users and enterprise teams needing a self-hosted system to organize and index documents with OCR.
Key capabilities
Transforms physical documents into a searchable online archive.
Provides a public demo instance for users to try the application before installation.
Limitations and risks
Document information is stored in clear text without encryption.
The application should never be run on an untrusted host due to the sensitive nature of the stored document data.
Getting started
Setup is considered easy because the project provides an automated install script for Docker Compose. No coding is required to execute the script and deploy the application.
Alternatives and comparisons
Provides an OCR engine for converting images of text into machine-readable text, supporting over 100 languages.
Converts complex documents like PDFs and Office docs into machine-readable formats for downstream retrieval and processing.
Converts PDF documents and images into structured data to support RAG and agentic applications.
GitHub project description: A community-supported supercharged document management system: scan, index and archive all your documents
README: Paperless-ngx is the official successor to the original Paperless & Paperless-ng projects
README: Paperless-ngx is a document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can keep, well, _less paper_.
README: The easiest way to deploy paperless is `docker compose`. The files in the `/docker/compose` directory are configured to pull the image from the GitHub container registry.
README: Paperless-ngx should never be run on an untrusted host because information is stored in clear text without encryption.