How does it differ from paperless?
this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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Papra is a minimalistic document management and archiving platform. It is designed to be simple to use and accessible to everyone. Papra is a platform for long-term document storage and management, like a digital archive for your documents.
Forget about that receipt of that gift you bought for your friend last year, or that warranty for your new phone. With Papra, you can easily store, forget, and retrieve your documents whenever you need them.
A live demo of the platform is available at demo.papra.app (no backend, client-side local storage only).
Github Project: https://github.com/papra-hq/papra
Feature List
Tap me for full list ✌️
- Document management: Upload, store, and manage your documents in one place.
- Organizations: Create organizations to manage documents with family, friends, or colleagues.
- Search: Quickly search for documents with full-text search.
- Authentication: User accounts and authentication.
- Dark Mode: A dark theme for those late-night document management sessions.
- Responsive Design: Works on all devices, from desktops to mobile phones.
- Open Source: The project is open-source and free to use.
- Self-hosting: Host your own instance of Papra using Docker or other methods.
- Tags: Organize your documents with tags.
- Email ingestion: Send/forward emails to a generated address to automatically import documents.
- Content extraction: Automatically extract text from images or scanned documents for search.
- In progress: i18n: Support for multiple languages.
- Coming soon: Tagging Rules: Automatically tag documents based on custom rules.
- Coming soon: Folder ingestion: Automatically import documents from a folder.
- Coming soon: SDK and API: Build your own applications on top of Papra.
- Coming soon: CLI: Manage your documents from the command line.
- Coming soon: Document sharing: Share documents with others.
- Coming soon: Document requests: Generate upload links for people to add documents.
- Coming maybe one day: Mobile app: Access and upload documents on the go.
- Coming maybe one day: Desktop app: Access and upload documents from your computer.
After a quick glance at the demo, I think the UI design is better than Paperless-ngx (at least on mobile). But, it only has tags. Not correspondents and document types. It also lacks the automatic matching feature, advanced search filters, custom fields, and customizable document views that Paperless has.
Well it did say minimalistic.
Tbh, paperless has a load of stuff I don't use anyway.
So I'm staying with paperless-ngx, then
I would be interested in a simplified version of paperless. Don’t get me wrong, it’s impressive. But I don’t really need all the powerful options it has, and wouldn’t mind something less complex to manage.
Is this a fork of paperless?
Doesn't seem like it. Paperless is however listed as an inspiration, lastly in the README.
How is this different from just having good folder structure for your pdfs? Not trying to be a contrarian here; just curious about the selling points.
At least for paperless, one of the selling points is OCR plus text search. Do you can dump in all your receipts as photos, and then 3 years later, search "lawnmower" and find the receipt for it. (I dont know if this applies for this software, but its very nice in paperless)
That does sound useful
Damn I've gotta set up one of these, whether it be this one or paperless. The text recognition in photos would be huge.
Just to lightly temper your expectations, the OCR isnt perfect, and you may need to add your own tags/text, but its still an awesome system.
So basically gmail's motto: "search. dont sort"
Not necessarily, paperless offers various sorting and cataloguing features, as well as rules and basic learning. If you spend time setting it all up, it should drive itself in time and search may only be a fallback mechanism.
It's really useful where you can tell it 'catalogue this as x, but also store it as y'. So, again, if done properly, you can move to another system with already well catalogued document structure.
Lots of things are improved with a GUI. IMO this is one of them.
Having a no-nonsense and predictable folder structure to store documents makes sense for those who are organized. For those who aren't, you can still use projects like this to sort data so they're retrievable by everyone, not just those who know and understand your folder structure.
The intake emails are particularly interesting. Receive email with attachment and save it automatically. Excellent for repetitively collecting data without setting anything extra up. Just create an email alias for your intake, and distribute it. Wait for people to email shit to you.
Great idea, IMO.
Welcome addition to the alternatives, however Paperless has set the bar pretty high.
Certainly true, but I think paperless might be a tad overkill for some people.
The UI elements look like the ones used in Portainer, is it some frontend library?
Seems like shadcn on first glance. By now it feels like the new bootstrap.
Thanks!
Is there a docker-free version due?
can anyone comment on how the files are actually stored? is everything imported into a database or can it just work with any sort of folder structure you have already?
I'm not a 100% certain as I've yet to try the application myself. However one of the configuration pages mentions you can choose between three different methods of choosing storage driver.
DOCUMENT_STORAGE_DRIVER The driver to use for document storage, values can be one of:
filesystem,s3,in-memory.
- Path:
documentsStorage.driver- Environment variable:
DOCUMENT_STORAGE_DRIVER- Default value:
filesystem
Also it mentions the use of an ingestion folder.
That's the most I can gather from quickly checking the docs at least.
I tried to run the container with the nearly default but was unable to start. Found an error in the log as ConnectionFailed("Unable to open connection to local database./app-data/db/db.sqlite: 14") at new Database.… at _createClient
I am binding to /DATA/AppData/papra:/app/app-data
When I run the container, papra folder was created with 0777 permission but no files in there.
Finally, I manually create a db folder under papra, and now the container able to run successfully.