Last Updated on May 22, 2026
Docspell is a personal document organizer.
You’ll need a scanner to convert your papers into files. Docspell can then assist in organizing the resulting mess. It can unify your files from scanners, emails and other sources. It is targeted for home use, i.e. families, households and also for smaller groups/companies.
You can associate tags, set correspondents and lots of other predefined and custom metadata. If your documents are associated with such metadata, 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. For machine learning, it relies on the GPL Stanford Core NLP library.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Multi-User per Account – each account (a collective) can have multiple users that share the same files. For example, everyone in your family can work with your files while using their own account with their own settings.
- Text Extraction with OCR – text is extracted from all files. For scanned documents/images, OCR is used by utilising tesseract. The text is analysed and is available for full-text search.
- Text Analysis – the extracted text is analysed using machine learning algorithms to find properties that can be annotated to your documents automatically.
- Support for many files – reads many file types. ZIP and EML (e-mail file format) files are extracted and their contents imported.
- Conversion to PDF – all files are converted to PDF with the original files untouched.
- Full-text search – extracted text of all files and some properties, like names and notes, are available for full-text search. Full-text search can also be used to further constrain the results of the search-menu where you can search by tags, correspondent, etc.
- Send via E-Mail – define SMTP settings in the app and are then able to send items out via E-Mail
- Import Mailboxes – define IMAP settings so that docspell can import their e-mails
- Notifications – by e-mail, Matrix or Gotify with documents resulting from a query that is executed periodically. Notifications can also be configured for specific events.
Website: docspell.org
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Eike Kettner and contributors
License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
Docspell is written in Elm and Scala. Learn Elm with our recommended free tutorials. Learn Scala with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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