Paperless-ngx
Hacker ApprovedDocument management system in Productivity & writing
Free, open source, self-hosted document archive that OCRs and indexes scanned files so they become searchable, and runs well on modest hardware.
Free, open source, self-hosted document archive that OCRs and indexes scanned files so they become searchable, and runs well on modest hardware.
16 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 15
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 94%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 15 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 15 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Automatic ingestion from scanner or folder
“I've set up a share where the scanner scans, and it automatically picks it up from there and ingests it into the system.”
Comment from 9 Jul 2026 in “Turning a pile of documents into a searchable useable knowledge base” “might be game changing if both pointed to the same folder”
Comment from 9 Jul 2026 in “Turning a pile of documents into a searchable useable knowledge base” OCR makes documents searchable
“paperless-ngx and their built-in OCR might help here for the data transformation”
Comment from 2 Jan 2026 in “10 years of personal finances in plain text files” “drop the files in there and it'll be OCR'ed and searchable”
Comment from 2 Mar 2026 in “How to Record and Retrieve Anything You've Ever Had to Look Up Twice” Free, open source, self-hosted
“a true and tested open source solution that's been filling this niche successfully for decades now”
Comment from 2 Apr 2026 in “Google releases Gemma 4 open models” “I can't believe self-hosted products of this caliber are free”
Comment from 3 Jul 2026 in “Immich v3.0.0 Released” Works well and keeps improving
“it looks like its turning into quite an effective tool these days”
Comment from 3 Mar 2026 in “How to Record and Retrieve Anything You've Ever Had to Look Up Twice” “Paperless-NGX works amazingly well and runs on a potato.”
Comment from 3 Apr 2026 in “Google releases Gemma 4 open models”
What people said
11 of the 16 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“paperless-ngx was already an absolute ball of mud, and now there’s a new major version that’s somehow even worse”
“kind of like paperless-ngx and immich as another plug”
“might be game changing if both pointed to the same folder”
“I've set up a share where the scanner scans, and it automatically picks it up from there and ingests it into the system.”
“I can't believe self-hosted products of this caliber are free”
“Paperless-NGX works amazingly well and runs on a potato.”
“a true and tested open source solution that's been filling this niche successfully for decades now”
“it looks like its turning into quite an effective tool these days”
“drop the files in there and it'll be OCR'ed and searchable”
“Structured extraction is exactly what Paperless has been missing.”
“paperless-ngx and their built-in OCR might help here for the data transformation”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.