Papra 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 Papra's 83, putting it ahead on the strength of a higher commit volume and a larger community. That measures project health, not feature fit — Papra may still be the right choice if it does what you need.
PapraStirling-PDF
Health score 83/100 95/100
Commits (11 mo) 685 1674
Commits (last 3 mo) 218 766
Stars 5.5k 93k
Latest release 1 Sept 2026 26 Sept 2026
Licence AGPL-3.0 Apache-2.0
Built with Docker Docker, Java
Typical RAM 1 GB 2 GB

Papra

Minimalist document storage, management and archiving platform designed to be simple to use and accessible to everyone.

83/100
Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 29/40
Releases 25/25
Community 14/20
Momentum 15/15

Commit activity more than 72% of tracked projects; popularity more than 68%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 72 commits 2025-11: 45 commits 2025-12: 43 commits 2026-01: 114 commits 2026-02: 41 commits 2026-03: 37 commits 2026-04: 73 commits 2026-05: 42 commits 2026-06: 134 commits 2026-07: 63 commits 2026-08: 21 commits

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

2025-10: 82 commits 2025-11: 119 commits 2025-12: 119 commits 2026-01: 131 commits 2026-02: 102 commits 2026-03: 116 commits 2026-04: 121 commits 2026-05: 118 commits 2026-06: 248 commits 2026-07: 213 commits 2026-08: 305 commits

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.