Stirling PDF
Document ManagementPowerful locally hosted web-based PDF toolkit
Replaces Adobe Acrobat, Smallpdf
Best Lightweight Document Management for self-hosting
The 5 best Lightweight document management you can self-host, ranked by community traction.
OCRmyPDF
Document ManagementAdd a searchable OCR text layer to scanned PDFs
Replaces Adobe Acrobat
Filestash
Document ManagementWeb-based file manager and document gateway
Replaces Dropbox, SharePoint
Gotenberg
Document ManagementAPI for converting documents to PDF
Replaces Adobe PDF Services
OpenDocMan
Document ManagementFree web-based document management system in PHP
Replaces DocuWare, M-Files
No apps match these filters.
At a glance
| App | Deploy effort | Difficulty | Min. RAM | License | ★ Stars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stirling PDF | Under-an-hour setup | Easy | 512 MB | MIT | 94,157 |
| OCRmyPDF | Under-an-hour setup | Easy | 512 MB | MPL-2.0 | 35,016 |
| Filestash | Under-an-hour setup | Easy | 256 MB | AGPL-3.0 | 14,790 |
| Gotenberg | Under-an-hour setup | Easy | 512 MB | MIT | 13,276 |
| OpenDocMan | Under-an-hour setup | Medium | 512 MB | GPL-2.0 | 282 |
Quick picks
- Most adopted: Stirling PDF (94,157 GitHub stars).
- Lightest footprint: Filestash (from 256 MB RAM, against 512 MB for the heaviest here).
- Licensing: 2 of 5 use MIT; check the rest individually if you plan to modify and redistribute.
Every option here is open-source and self-hostable, tagged Lightweight within the document management category. Deploy effort is graded from published container recipes, not vendor claims — see the methodology.