Alternatives to Paperwork
A personal document manager that scans or imports papers and makes them searchable. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Paperwork
A personal document manager that scans or imports papers and makes them searchable.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Paperwork.
Papermerge OSS
Self-hosted document archive with OCR, tagging and full-text search.
Papermerge OSS is a self-hosted document archive with OCR, tagging and full-text search via Docker, though it is seeking maintainers and has no polished installer.
PaperOffice DMS
Document management and OCR suite with cloud AI and on-premises options.
PaperOffice DMS is a paid document management and OCR suite for Windows and macOS with on-premises and cloud AI options, rather than free open-source software.
Also worth comparing
These listings name Paperwork as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
Document Scanner
GNOME's simple scanning app, formerly Simple Scan, for saving scanned documents as PDFs or images.
Paperwork scans documents into a searchable personal archive with automatic labels, running on Linux and Windows, and is more of a document manager than a quick scanner.
gscan2pdf
Linux graphical program for scanning documents and saving them as PDF or DjVu files.
Paperwork scans or imports papers into a searchable document library with automatic labels, running on Linux and Windows rather than just saving individual PDFs.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
NAPS2
Simple document scanning to PDF with built-in OCR.
Tesseract OCR
The open-source OCR engine behind most free text recognition tools.
Keep It
A notebook and document organizer for Mac, iPhone and iPad that integrates with the Finder.
