Papermerge is an open source document management system (DMS) primarily designed for archiving and retrieving your digital documents.
Instead of having piles of paper documents all over your desk, office or drawers - you can quickly scan them and configure your scanner to directly upload to Papermerge DMS. Papermerge DMS on its turn will OCR the document and index it. You will be able to quickly find any (scanned!) document using full text search capabilities.
Papermerge's main use case is long term storage of digital archives.
Papermerge DMS is actively developed.
This is web-based software. This means there is no executable file (aka no .exe files), and it must be run on a web server and accessed through a web browser.
Currently there are two main versions 2.0 and 2.1. Version 2.1 is almost a complete rewrite of 2.0 and thus is incompatible with it (for details see last section). Screenshot of Papermerge 2.1:
Screenshot of Papermerge 2.0:
This repository is meta-repository - which means that source code of the application is not here. This repository is used to track project's existence, status and its issues. As the application grew it was necessary to split it into multiple repositories and in same time move new repositories under Papermerge Github Organization.
| Repository | Description |
|---|---|
| ciur/papermerge | Meta-repository which keeps track the project existence, status, and its issues. |
| papermerge/papermerge-core | Source code for REST API Backend server. The heart of the project. |
| papermerge/papermerge.js | Source code for Frontend - desktop like modern user interface. |
| papermerge/documentation | Source code for the documentation. |
| papermerge/openapi-schema | OpenAPI schema. |
| papermerge/rest-api-clients | Clients generated from OpenAPI schema. |
| papermerge/papermerge-cli | Command line utility to interact with your Papermerge DMS instance (e.g. import recursively local folders). |
| papermerge/helm-chart | Helm Chart for deploying Papermerge in Kubernetes cluster. |
| Repository | Description |
|---|---|
| docs.papermerge.io | Online Documentation |
| REST API reference/swagger | Online REST API reference with swagger UI |
| REST API reference/redoc | Online REST API reference with redoc UI |
| https://papermerge.com | Homepage |
| YouTube Channel | YouTube channel |
To be efficient you always need to choose right tool for the problem. Because Document Management term is too wide - I think that a definition of what is a Document in context of Papermerge software is needed.
For Papermerge a document is anything which is a good candidate for archiving - some piece of information which is not editable but you need to store it for future reference. For example receipts are good examples - you don't need to read receipts everyday, but eventually you will need them for your tax declaration. In this sense - scanned documents, which are usually in PDF or TIFF format, are perfect match.
Within Papermerge context terms document, scanned document, pdf document, and digital archive are used interchangeable and mean the same thing.
Papermerge shines when it comes to storing documents for long term, in other words Papermerge's main use case is long term storage of digital archives.
Out of scope are Office documents (ODT, DOCX....), text files (notes) which usually are editable.
Papermerge is simply not designed to store books. Yes, you can scan a book and import it in Papermerge, but again - this is not what Papermerge was intended for.
- Documents of pdf, jpg, png, tiff formats are supported
- Desktop like user interface
- OCR - used to extract text for documents indexing
- Full text search
- Document Versioning (all operations on the documents are non destructive)
- User defined metadata per folder/document/page
- Tags - assign colored tags to documents or folders
- Documents and Folders - users can organize documents in folders
- Multi-User (Groups, Roles)
- User permissions management
- Document permissions management
- REST API
- Page Management - delete, reorder, rotate and extract pages
- Basic automation
See last section for details on feature set in Papermerge 2.0 and Papermerge 2.1
For donations, you can use PayPal and GitHub Sponsorship:
We welcome contributions! In general, if change is very small, like fixing a documentation typo, remove unused variable or minor adjustments of docker related files - you can create a pull request right away. If your change is small and reasonable it will be (very likely) almost immediately accepted.
For bigger changes, like a new feature or even change/add/remove of whole paragraph in documentation - please first discuss the change you wish to make via GitHub issue, pull request or email.
For more information, see the contributing file.
In general rewriting application from scratch is dubious adventure. However, because Papermerge 2.0 had too many design flaws - maintenance of which, in short and long term is a serious pain - we've decided, for good or ill, to rewrite it.
As result Papermerge 2.1 was born. Although they look similar, Papermerge 2.0 and Papermerge 2.1 are entirely different and incompatible applications.
Because rewriting of Papermerge took by far more time than planned, many of the 2.0 features still did not made it to Papermerge 2.1. Keep in mind, that in long term, almost all features of Papermerge 2.0 will be "ported back" to subsequent versions (e.g. Automates, Metadata).
Here is a table of features comparisons of both versions:
| Feature | Papermerge 2.0 | Papermerge 2.1 | Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|
| PDF format | ✔️ | ✔️ | |
| png format | ✔️ | ❌ | Will be ported in future versions |
| jpeg format | ✔️ | ❌ | Will be ported in future versions |
| tiff format | ✔️ | ❌ | Depending on request, may be ported in future versions |
| Desktop like UI | ✔️ | ✔️ | in 2.1 UI is reactive |
| Dual Panel | ❌ | ✔️ | |
| Realtime OCR feedback | ❌ | ✔️ | |
| OCR | ✔️ | ✔️ | in 2.1 uses OCRmyPDF |
| Download document with OCRed text layer | ❌ | ✔️ | in 2.1 uses OCRmyPDF |
| Full Text Search | ✔️ | ✔️ | in 2.1 you can choose between multiple search backends |
| Document Versioning | ❌ | ✔️ | Actually 2.0 has some very limited and hacky support for document versions |
| User defined metadata per folder/document/page | ✔️ | ❌ | Will be ported in future versions |
| Automates | ✔️ | ❌ | Will be ported in future versions |
| Tags - assign colored tags to documents or folders | ✔️ | ✔️ | |
| Documents and Folders | ✔️ | ✔️ | |
| Multi-User (Groups, Roles) | ✔️ | ✔️ | |
| User permissions management | ✔️ | ✔️ | |
| Document permissions management | ✔️ | ❌ | Will be ported in future versions |
| REST API | ✔️ | ✔️ | |
| Page Delete/Reorder/Move | ✔️ | ✔️ | |
| Page Rotation | ❌ | ✔️ | |
| Documents Merging | ❌ | ✔️ | |
| Cloud Native/K8s Support | ❌ | ✔️ |