Docspell
Auto-tagging document organizer and archive.
Description from awesome-selfhosted (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Still maintained? Yes: 24 commits in the last 90 days, latest release v0.43.0 (Mar 2025).
Also an alternative to Paperless Cloud and Adobe Acrobat.
At a glance
Docspell quick facts
- Health score
- 67/100 SLOWING
- Stars
- 2,342
- Last commit
- 3 days ago (Oct 2026)
- Latest release
- v0.43.0, Mar 2025
- Licence
- GPL-3.0
Top alternatives to Docspell
Full rankings: Paperless Cloud alternatives, Adobe Acrobat alternatives
In its own words
The project's README opens: "You can associate tags, set correspondends and lots of other predefined and custom metadata. If your documents are associated with such meta data, you can quickly find them later using the search feature. But adding this manually is a tedious task. Docspell can help by suggesting correspondents, guessing tags or finding dates using machine learning. It can learn metadata from existing documents and find things using NLP. This makes adding metadata to your documents a lot easier."
Why it ranks here
Health score explained
Docspell scores 67/100, #12 of 17 in Document Management: 24 commits in the last 90 days earn 28.0 of 35 points, the latest release (v0.43.0, 1.6 years ago) earns 5.8 of 25, 2,342 stars add 13.5 of 20, an active, unarchived repository keeps 10 and Docker support adds the final 10. That places it in the slowing band (40 to 69). The biggest shortfall is release recency, worth 19.2 more points.
Recomputed nightly from the GitHub API. How the score is calculated.
- Commit activity 28.0 / 35
24 commits in 90 days (30+ scores full marks)
- Release recency biggest shortfall 5.8 / 25
v0.43.0 released 1.6 years ago
- Stars 13.5 / 20
2.3k stars on GitHub (logarithmic)
- Not archived 10.0 / 10
Repository is active
- Docker support 10.0 / 10
Docker image or Compose file available
Commit activity
- 24
- Last 90 days
- 84
- Last 12 months
- 3 days ago
- Last push
Ranked #12 of 17 tools in Document Management by health , between Papermerge (#11) and Signature PDF (#13) .
Details
| Licence | GPL-3.0 |
| Platforms | Scala, Java, Docker |
| Latest release | v0.43.0 · 1.6 years ago |
| Stars | 2,342 |
| Open issues | 214 |
| Docker | Yes |
| Repository | eikek/docspell ↗ |
Docspell vs its top 5 alternatives
Active tools that share a comparison page or a category with Docspell (Document Management), scored on the same five terms.
| Tool | Health | Stars | Licence | Last commit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paperless-ngx | 99 | 47k | GPL-3.0 | today |
| Gotenberg | 97 | 13k | MIT | today |
| Papra | 95 | 5.6k | AGPL-3.0 | yesterday |
| Papermerge | 79 | 550 | Apache-2.0 | yesterday |
| Docspell (this tool) | 67 | 2.3k | GPL-3.0 | 3 days ago |
| Mayan EDMS | 35 | 682 | GPL-2.0 | 1 month ago |
Docspell: common questions
What does Docspell replace?
Repoly lists Docspell as an open-source alternative to Paperless Cloud and Adobe Acrobat. Each comparison page ranks every alternative by the same health score, so you can see where Docspell stands against the others.
Is Docspell still maintained?
Docspell had 24 commits in the last 90 days and its last push was 3 days ago; the latest tagged release, v0.43.0, is from 1.6 years ago. Repoly recomputes this nightly.
Run itSponsored
Run Docspell on a VPS from $4/mo
Docspell ships a Docker image, so any of these providers can run it on a small instance.
- is*hosting NVMe VPS in 20+ locations, hourly billing from $5/mo Deploy ↗
- ProHoster VPS with DDoS protection included from $4/mo Deploy ↗
- GODLIKE Game and app servers on NVMe from $4/mo Deploy ↗
Affiliate links. Repoly may earn a commission, which never affects health scores.