Home - Paperless-ngx
Author: the Paperless-ngx team
Description: Documentation for the Paperless-ngx document management system software.

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# Home

Paperless-ngx is a community-supported open-source document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can keep, well, less paper.

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## Features

- Organize and index your scanned documents with tags, correspondents, types, and more.
- Your data is stored locally on your server and is never transmitted or shared in any way, unless you explicitly choose to do so.
- Performs OCR on your documents, adding searchable and selectable text, even to documents scanned with only images.
- Utilizes the open-source Tesseract engine to recognize more than 100 languages.
- New! Supports remote OCR with Azure AI (opt-in).
- Documents are saved as PDF/A format which is designed for long term storage, alongside the unaltered originals.
- Uses machine-learning to automatically add tags, correspondents and document types to your documents.
- New: Paperless-ngx can optionally leverage AI (Large Language Models or LLMs) for document suggestions, chatting with your documents, and similar-document retrieval. These features are opt-in and disabled by default.
- Supports PDF documents, images, plain text files, Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and LibreOffice equivalents)[^1] and more.
- Paperless stores your documents plain on disk. Filenames and folders are managed by paperless and their format can be configured freely with different configurations assigned to different documents.
- Keep multiple versions of a document's file under a single entry, sharing one set of metadata.
- Beautiful, modern web application that features:
- Customizable dashboard with statistics.
- Filtering by tags, correspondents, types, and more.
- Bulk editing of tags, correspondents, types and more.
- Drag-and-drop uploading of documents throughout the app.
- Customizable views can be saved and displayed on the dashboard and / or sidebar.
- Support for custom fields of various data types.
- Shareable public links with optional expiration.
- Full text search helps you find what you need:
- Auto completion suggests relevant words from your documents.
- Results are sorted by relevance to your search query.
- Highlighting shows you which parts of the document matched the query.
- Searching for similar documents ("More like this")
- Email processing[^1]: import documents from your email accounts:
- Configure multiple accounts and rules for each account.
- After processing, paperless can perform actions on the messages such as marking as read, deleting and more.
- A built-in robust multi-user permissions system that supports 'global' permissions as well as per document or object.
- A powerful workflow system that gives you even more control.
- Optimized for multi core systems: Paperless-ngx consumes multiple documents in parallel.
- The integrated sanity checker makes sure that your document archive is in good health.

[^1]: Office document and email consumption support is optional and provided by Apache Tika (see configuration)

## Paperless, a history

Paperless-ngx is the official successor to the original Paperless & Paperless-ng projects and is designed to distribute the responsibility of advancing and supporting the project among a team of people. Consider joining us!

Further discussion of the transition between these projects can be found at ng#1599 and ng#1632.

## Screenshots

Paperless-ngx aims to be as nice to use as it is useful. Check out some screenshots below.

The dashboard shows saved views which can be sorted. Documents can be uploaded with the button or dropped anywhere in the application.

The document list provides three different styles to browse your documents.

Use the 'slim' sidebar to focus on your docs and minimize the UI.

Of course, Paperless-ngx also supports dark mode:

Quickly find documents with extensive filtering mechanisms.

And perform bulk edit operations to set tags, correspondents, etc. as well as permissions.

Side-by-side editing of documents.

Support for custom fields.

A robust permissions system with support for 'global' and document / object permissions.

Searching provides auto complete and highlights the results.

Tag, correspondent, document type and storage path editing.

Mail rules support various filters and actions for incoming e-mails.

Workflows provide finer control over the document pipeline and trigger actions.

Mobile devices are supported.

## Support

Community support is available via GitHub Discussions and the Matrix chat room.

### Feature Requests

Feature requests can be submitted via GitHub Discussions where you can search for existing ideas, add your own and vote for the ones you care about.

### Bugs

For bugs please open an issue or start a discussion if you have questions.

## Contributing

People interested in continuing the work on paperless-ngx are encouraged to reach out on GitHub or the Matrix chat room. If you would like to contribute to the project on an ongoing basis there are multiple teams (frontend, ci/cd, etc) that could use your help so please reach out!

### Translation

Paperless-ngx is available in many languages that are coordinated on Crowdin. If you want to help out by translating paperless-ngx into your language, please head over to the Paperless-ngx project at Crowdin, and thank you!

## Scanners & Software

Paperless-ngx is compatible with many different scanners and scanning tools. A user-maintained list of scanners and other software is available on the wiki.