Paperless-ngx
Turn every scan, PDF and email attachment into a searchable, tagged archive — on your own server.
Paperless-ngx
Paperless-ngx is an open-source document management system. It ingests documents from scanners, watched folders, IMAP mailboxes or its web UI, OCRs them, classifies and tags them automatically, and stores the originals untouched so you keep legally valid copies.
OneNote and Evernote are great for notes; they are terrible archives for the real paperwork of a company — contracts, invoices, certificates, registration documents. Paperless-ngx is built for exactly that boring, important pile: structured tags, correspondents, document types, and full-text search over years of paperwork, all of it sitting on a disk you own.
Capabilities
OCR and full-text search
Tesseract OCR with multi-language support turns scanned PDFs and images into searchable, copy-pasteable text.
Automatic tagging
Machine-learning classifier learns from your past documents and proposes tags, correspondents and document types for new arrivals.
Multiple intake paths
Drop files into a watched folder, fetch from IMAP, push from a scanner, upload from the web UI or the mobile app — they all land in the same archive.
Originals preserved
Paperless keeps the original file bit-for-bit so you stay compliant with retention rules and tax law — the searchable copy is on top, not instead.
Why this beats the proprietary default
The same advantages apply across every product on this page — open source is a category-level upgrade, not a niche preference.
Auditable source code
Anyone can read, review and audit the code. Security researchers, your own engineers, or an independent auditor — no black boxes, no "trust us".
Your data, your infrastructure
Runs on hardware you control, in a jurisdiction you choose. No silent data exports to a US hyperscaler, no "product improvement" sampling of your content.
Predictable cost, no per-seat tax
Pay for hosting and operations, not for every user, mailbox or feature flag. Adding the tenth or hundredth user doesn't multiply your bill.
Exit is built in
Open standards, open formats, no vendor lock-in. If you ever want to move — to another host, another team, in-house — the data and the software are yours to take.
Want to run Paperless-ngx on your terms?
We host, monitor, patch and back up the whole stack on European infrastructure — so you get the open-source upside without the operations cost.