Paperless-ngx review

Paperless-ngx is the strongest pure document manager on the list and it costs nothing in license fees. Each document can carry tags, a correspondent, a document type and custom fields, and the app uses machine learning to suggest those values for new files. OCR through Tesseract adds searchable text to scans in more than 100 languages, and files are saved as PDF/A next to the unaltered originals. Full text search offers autocomplete, relevance sorting, highlighted matches and a more like this option. It can pull documents from email accounts, run workflows, keep several versions under one entry and apply permissions per user or per document, so a small team can share one archive. The trade-off is ownership: someone has to install it, patch it and back it up, and the project itself says the safest setup is a local server with backups. Opt-in AI features stay off by default.

Who it is for

Small offices and households with someone comfortable running Docker who want real tags, OCR and full-text search at no cost.

Price

Free and open source under the GPL-3.0 license; you pay only for your own server or hardware.

Paperless-ngx is a document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can keep, well, less paper.
Quoted from the vendor pricing page on November 10, 2026.

Key features

• Tags, correspondents, document types and custom fields
• OCR with the Tesseract engine in more than 100 languages
• Machine learning that suggests tags, correspondents and document types
• Full text search with autocomplete, highlighting and similar document lookup
• Email import, workflows and multi-user permissions per document

Strengths and weaknesses

• Strength: The most complete free tagging and search on this list
• Strength: No user limits or per seat fees
• Strength: Keeps the unaltered original next to a PDF/A archive copy
• Weakness: You install, update and back it up yourself
• Weakness: The project advises against running it on an untrusted host
• Weakness: Built for archiving finished documents, not live co-editing

Key facts

• License: GPL-3.0, open source
• OCR languages: More than 100 via Tesseract
• File types: PDF, images, plain text, Office documents (with Apache Tika)
• Hosting: Self-hosted, Docker image

Where it ranks

Paperless-ngx is No. 2 in our Best Free Document Management Software verdict.