Documenso vs Stirling-PDF

Both are self-hosted document management projects. This page compares how well each one is actually maintained — the part you cannot see from a feature list.

Stirling-PDF scores 95 against Documenso's 78, putting it ahead on the strength of a higher commit volume and a stronger recent trend. That measures project health, not feature fit — Documenso may still be the right choice if it does what you need.

	Documenso	Stirling-PDF
Health score	78/100	95/100
Commits (11 mo)	667	1674
Commits (last 3 mo)	150	766
Stars	15k	93k
Latest release	9 Sept 2026	26 Sept 2026
Licence	AGPL-3.0	Apache-2.0
Built with	Nodejs, Docker	Docker, Java
Typical RAM	1 GB	2 GB

Documenso

Digital document signing platform (alternative to DocuSign).

78/100

Healthy

Actively maintained with regular releases.

Maintenance 28/40

Releases 25/25

Community 17/20

Momentum 8/15

Commit activity more than 71% of tracked projects; popularity more than 84%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

Stirling-PDF

Local hosted web application that allows you to perform various operations on PDF files, such as merging, splitting, file conversions and OCR.

95/100

Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 35/40

Releases 25/25

Community 20/20

Momentum 15/15

Commit activity more than 88% of tracked projects; popularity in the top 1%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

How to read this

Everything above is measured, not opinion: commit counts and release dates come from the public repositories, and the health score ranks each project against all 1352 projects we track. Read the full method.

What this comparison deliberately does not do is tell you which has the better feature set. Maintenance health tells you which project will still be receiving security fixes in two years. Decide that first, then compare features on the projects that survive the filter.

See every option in this category: self-hosted document management.