Paperless
App in the BluixApps catalog
What it is
Paperless-ngx is a document management system that scans, OCRs, tags, and archives your paper documents into a searchable digital library. Consumes from email, scanner upload, watched folder; OCRs everything via Tesseract; auto-tags via machine learning. Replaces a filing cabinet with a fast searchable archive.
For households and small businesses drowning in paper — receipts, contracts, bills, tax docs — Paperless-ngx is the canonical answer.
What it's for
- Household paper archival — receipts, invoices, tax documents, contracts
- Small business records — supplier invoices, contracts, employee documents
- Legal compliance — retain financial records for required statutory periods
- Tax preparation — searchable archive of all year-relevant documents
- Office digitization — scan-and-shred workflow for going paperless
Who it's for
- Households & families managing personal paperwork (taxes, bills, contracts)
- Small business owners replacing physical filing with searchable digital archive
- Accountants organizing client documents per tax year
- Legal professionals managing case documents with full-text search
- Privacy-conscious users rejecting cloud document services for sensitive paperwork
Why teams pick Paperless-ngx over alternatives
- GPL-3.0 — fully open, no commercial restrictions for self-host
- OCR built-in — Tesseract integration on every document automatically
- Auto-tagging — ML-based classification trained on your tagging patterns
- Email ingestion — forward bills/receipts to a dedicated address, auto-import
- Mobile-friendly — responsive UI, mobile scanner app integrations
- Active development — community-maintained fork after original abandonment
Integrations
- Document sources — watched folder, email IMAP, REST API upload, mobile apps
- OCR engines — Tesseract (100+ languages), djvulibre for DJVU
- Scanners — any device that can scan-to-folder or scan-to-email
- Mobile apps — Paperless Mobile (Android), iOS via web
- Identity — local users + LDAP via reverse proxy auth
- Storage — local filesystem or S3-compatible for documents
- Webhooks — fire on document classification events
Notable users & community
- 23k+ GitHub stars
- Featured constantly on r/selfhosted as "the project that ended my paper backlog"
- Active GitHub Discussions community
- Continuous releases tracking OCR improvements
- Community-maintained fork of original Paperless (now Paperless-ngx)
Tips & operations
- Email ingestion changes life — forward all bills/receipts to a dedicated address, auto-import
- Document tagging ML — needs training data; tag 50-100 documents manually first
- OCR is CPU-heavy — bulk-import of years of paper can take days; let it run
- Use S3 for documents — local storage grows fast; offload originals to S3-compatible
- Tika + Gotenberg for office docs — DOCX/PPTX preview needs these sidecars
- Backup is critical — these ARE your important documents; verify backup integrity regularly
What we ship in BluixApps
- Docker compose: Paperless-ngx + Postgres + Redis + Tika + Gotenberg
- Pinned
ghcr.io/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx:2.13.5(release-tagged) - HTTPS via Let's Encrypt; admin user with random password
- OCR enabled with English + Italian + German language packs
- Persistent volumes for documents + database
- Email ingestion configured (requires SMTP creds in env)
- Backup hook covers Postgres + documents (CRITICAL — opt-in for size)
Get this app — pick a BluixApps plan
Same catalog. Scaling tenant isolation, white-label and support tier.
| Tier | Tenants | Catalog | Support | White-label | Monthly | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stacks | 1 | 19 curated stacks | Standard | — | $19/mo | DetailDeploy |
| Starter | 10 | Full catalog | Standard | +$15–25/mo | $49/mo | DetailDeploy |
| Pro | 25 | Full catalog | Priority bugfix | +$15–25/mo | $149/mo | DetailDeploy |
| Growth | 100 | Full catalog | Priority bugfix | +$15–25/mo | $349/mo | DetailDeploy |
| Scale | 500 | Full catalog | 7-day window | +$15–25/mo | $799/mo | DetailDeploy |
| Enterprise | Unlimited | Full catalog | Priority 7-day | Bundled | $1,499/mo | DetailDeploy |