FormKiQ vs. Off-the-Shelf Software and Less Flexible SaaS
When is FormKiQ a better choice than Off-the-Shelf Software and Less Flexible SaaS?
FormKiQ vs. Building It Yourself
How does FormKiQ save time over custom in-house solutions?
Use Cases
FormKiQ works for small and large workflows, across all verticals and industries.
FormKiQ For Teams
Find out how FormKiQ can work for your team
FormKiQ For Industries
Discover the advantages FormKiQ can bring to your industry
Use Cases
Blockchain and Decentralized Storage
Leverage web3 technologies including proof of work and distributed systems for document control and data privacy
Content and Digital Asset Management
Integrate with your preferred web content management system while leveraging FormKiQ for managing your digital assets
Document Management Module
Integrate all of the required functionality of a document management system into an existing software solution
Integration with QMS or LIMS
Add missing functionality for your Quality Management or Laboratory Information Management by integrating with FormKiQ
Job Application Form
Receive applications, including cover letter and resume attachments, and import into an existing HR Management System
Legal Discovery Tool
Find information quickly by combining full-text search with AI-powered document classification
The Paperless Office: Digital Document Processing
Collect, process, and store paper and digital documents, allowing for archival, integration, and future recall
Product Leasing System
Process client lease applications, including a credit check and approval workflow
Company-Wide
Break down the silos in your organization with a centralized control center for documents, ready for integration with any and all systems
Engineering and Product
Reduce development time and agony with battle-tested components for your applications
Finance and Accounting
Process paper and electronic invoices and receipts, ready for integration with your important systems
HR and Recruiting
Build and support your people across the organization by integrating with your essential tools
IT and InfoSec
Provision a secure document store with the encryption and controls needed for compliance and protection
Legal
Manage and safeguard contracts and other essential documents across systems
Marketing
Add better discovery and reliability to digital assets and other essential content, while enabling integration with a web content management system
Sales
Keep track of sales assets and contracts inside and outside of your CRM and other tools
Accounting, Financial Services, and FinTech
Standardize financial documents, metadata, and workflows across systems, teams, auditors, and clients
Education, Training, and EdTech
Integrate Learning Management Systems with other essential applications and tools
Healthcare, Life Sciences, and MedTech
Combine secure and compliant records management with laboratory information management systems
Law Practices and Legal Services
Ensure efficient legal discovery and case management
Logistics and Transportation
Provide a robust and customized solution for fleet management or other logistics needs
Manufacturing, Production, and Utilities
Control and distribute essential documents and standard operating procedures within and between facilities, partners, and clients
Online Entertainment, Gaming, and Gambling
Provide the required compliance documents to partners, customers, and government agencies
Professional and Technical Services
Ensure that clients, inspectors, and subcontractors are aligned with consistent document control
Tech Startups
Build robust document management functionality into your disruptive product
UPDATE: we've taken a new look at the situation for 2023, and we still have the same six best, but with some changes to what they offer
Open Source is always a wide field, and we see that with electronic document management systems
Keeping track of all documents and data in the business world is crucial. Businesses can store documents in various ways, but one of the most popular methods is electronic document management systems (known as EDMS or DMS). EDMS are software programs that allow businesses to store, manage, and track their documents, wherever they reside throughout their network and associated cloud services, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft's OneDrive. But which are the Best Open Source Document Management Systems?
Many document management software options exist, both open source and proprietary. Open source EDMS has become increasingly popular because they offer many benefits over proprietary systems.
This article explores five of the best open-source document management systems currently available. We will discuss the features and benefits of each system, as well as how they compare to proprietary systems. But before we list our favorite Electronic Document Management Systems, let's briefly examine what open-source means and why you might want to use an open-source EDMS.
Open-Source Software vs. Proprietary software
When it comes to document management software, there are two main models, either an open source document management system or a proprietary option. Proprietary software is created and owned by a single company, with no access to the code provided to users or the community at large, while a community of contributors is able to view and contribute to the codebase of open source software. Both approaches have pros and cons, but open source software is generally seen as more beneficial for businesses.
Here's why:
Open-source software is more flexible
Proprietary document management software is designed to meet the specific needs or visions of the company that creates it, which can be good for businesses that closely align with the design, but it also means that if your business needs were to change, you're stuck with the software you have. With open source software, on the other hand, there are opportunities to request or even contribute modifications, combine additional modules from other open source projects, or even fork the codebase into your own version of the product, and make wholesale changes as you see fit.
And ultimately, if the company that created a proprietary product goes bankrupt or winds down, you may end up with a stagnant system that cannot be update, or in the worst-case scenario with Software-as-a-Service or even a self-hosted product, the application itself may just stop functioning completely with little-to-no warning. In open source, you can retain a copy of the codebase through forks or a mirrored clone, and in almost all cases, even defunct open source projects are available to view and download.
Open-source software is more affordable
Proprietary software typically requires you to pay a license fee to use it. This can be a significant expense, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). On the other hand, open source software is usually free for individuals and small businesses, while enterprise versions include onboarding and other organizational benefits for a cost that is often lower than their proprietary counterparts.
Also, since there is a large pool of users who can access, evaluate, and even contribute to the free version of the software, all without having to pay a license fee, an open source application is more likely to have had issues and feature requests found and documented openly. This can be of benefit even in the case of open source software that uses an “open core” model, where some of the enterprise-level functionality may not be publicly available, as the basic, core components will have that increased coverage.
This increased coverage and development-in-the-open model is one good reason why open source products often have competitive enterprise products compared to proprietary software competitors.
Open-source software is more secure
Proprietary software is often considered a greater security risk than open source software. That may seem counterintuitive at first, since the code is openly available to people other than the core development team, but it's the openness of open source software that provides it with more protection from security issues.
This is because the software code for proprietary software is closed off, meaning that only the company that creates that code has access to it. This can make it challenging to identify and fix security vulnerabilities. With open source software, on the other hand, the code is available for anyone to examine and experiment with, providing more coverage (as mentioned in the section about affordability). This means that security vulnerabilities can be found and fixed more quickly, and almost as importantly, security vulnerabilities that have not yet been reported can be reported by anyone, and anyone can contribute a remediation of that vulnerability to be reviewed and included into the codebase.
For an open source project, a critical vulnerability would need to be addressed due to high visibility in the code, whereas a developer of proprietary software does not have the same incentive to prioritize addressing vulnerabilities; that increases the software user’s risk footprint, as they are unable to verify which vulnerabilities exist in the proprietary codebase, and they will have little-to-no visibility as to if and when vulnerabilities are being resolved.
Additionally, open-source software features simple license management, no vendor lock-in, and support from active communities, providing less operational risk to organizations that rely on that software.
Determining Your EDMS Needs
Now that we've discussed the benefits of open source document management systems, we’ll look at five of the best. As each open-source EDMS software product has different strengths, you will probably find one or two that are better-suited for what you are looking to do. Some are self-hosted only, while others offer a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) version of their product. One product, FormKiQ, installs into your AWS cloud account, which might be considered a new “flavor” of self-hosting.
All of these five products have a version you can run for low cost, often with a free license plus your hosting costs. They all also offer a commercial version, often with additional features and support. And all have a codebase that you can review.
The Top 5 Open Source EDMS
For personal document management designed for scanning and digitizing paper, that is backed by a large community:
As described on the README, Paperless-ngx is a document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can keep, well, less paper.
Paperless-ngx is built using Python and TypeScript, and does not require a database. The files are hosted on your local computer.
Paperless-ngx - Key Features
Organize and index your scanned documents with tags, correspondents, types, and more.
Performs OCR on your documents, adds selectable text to image only documents and adds tags, correspondents and document types to your documents.
Supports PDF documents, images, plain text files, and Office documents using Apache Tikka (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and LibreOffice equivalents).
Single page application front end
Full text search with auto-completion
Email processing: Paperless adds documents from your email accounts
Machine-learning-powered document matching
Paperless-ngx - Offerings and Pricing
Self-Hosted
FREE
Can run on local computer or a server, installable using Docker or through a well-defined manual definition.
There are some videos available to help you set up and start using the system:
FormKiQ is an excellent option if you're looking for a flexible cloud-based solution, with an open-source headed or headless document management platform that offers powerful workflow capabilities. FormKiQ installs directly on your AWS cloud account with a one-click install. FormKiQ is considered as much of a integrated document layer for application development as it is an electronic document management system. It provides the essential components of document management as part of its free product, FormKiQ Core, with the ability to customize and extend the software within your AWS cloud account.
The commercial versions, FormKiQ Pro and FormKiQ Enterprise, offer professional support and services, as well as advanced features for EDMS or Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. You can also take advantage of a wide range of modular add-ons with FormKiQ Enterprise, such as the Document Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware Scanning and Protection Module or the Document Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Module.
FormKiQ is built with Java for the backend/API and JavaScript for the frontend web client, and uses Amazon DynamoDB for its database. Files are stored using Amazon S3.
FormKiQ - Key Features
API-First design, providing a headless EDMS while still supplying a web interface
Installs directly on your AWS cloud
Installation and onboarding service, as well as operational support (on Enterprise plans)
Modular add-ons for greater functionality in document control
Wide variety of file types recognized
Fully configurable custom document workflows
Robust security features, such as password protection and access control, with advanced security add-on modules
Cloud-based optical character recognition for translating scanned documents, using Tesseract or Amazon Textract
Fulltext Search using Typesense
Intelligent Document Tagging using OpenAI (API Key required)
Documents can be managed and classified easily - add and delete documents and tags using the API, Console, or Amazon Web Services’ Command Line Interface (CLI).
Multiple authentication types are available, including JWT, AWS IAM, and Key-based
FormKiQ - Offerings and Pricing
FormKiQ Core: Self-Hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
FREE
(+ AWS charges)
Deploys to your AWS cloud account with a one-click install
Teedy is billed as a “lightweight document management system”, and is a great option if you're looking for an open-source document management system that is well-tested and easy to use. With Teedy, you can easily organize your documents with tags and full-text search, and it has built-in optical character recognition (OCR). This system also offers robust security features, including password protection and role-based access control. Teedy is available as a cloud product with a free 30-day trial, while the self-hosted version is free and easy to install.
Teedy is built with Java for the backend/API and JavaScript for the frontend web client, and uses
H2
as an embedded database, but with an option to use PostgreSQL if preferred. Files are stored on the server’s filesystem.
Teedy - Key Features
Great, easy-to-use interface
Automatic import
Full-text search and document tagging for easy organization
Built-in optical character recognition (OCR)
Robust security features, including password protection and role-based access control
Video and image file support
Offers direct integration using its RESTful API
Teedy - Offerings and Pricing
Self-Hosted
FREE
Can run on local computer or a server via Docker or through a manual installation using Java and several dependencies.
If you're looking for an open-source web-based EDMS that is easy to use, the OpenDocMan document management system is a good option. This system is user-friendly, offers multilingual support, and boasts a simple interface that makes storing and retrieving documents easy. OpenDocMan offers robust security features, including password protection and role-based access control. The interface is basic, but you get an EDMS that is incredibly easy to deploy in multiple languages. The free version requires you to self-support, while the commercial license provides options for on-premise server storage. OpenDocMan also offers its software as an online service.
NOTE: OpenDocMan has not been updated since 2021.
OpenDocMan is built with PHP for both the backend/API and frontend web client, and uses MySQL/MariaDB for its database. Files are stored on the server’s filesystem.
OpenDocMan - Key Features
Offers multilingual support (including English, Chinese, Spanish, and German)
Role-based access control
Supports an extensive range of file types, including zip files
Revision history and version control
Automatic updates and other advanced features to control access
Direct email attachment import
Web interface for the cloud version
OpenDocMan - Offerings and Pricing
Self-Hosted
FREE
Can run on local computer or a server via Docker, an installation page, or through a manual installation; uses PHP and MySQL (or MariaDB).
If your organization works exclusively with PDFs (which most scanners can produce), then “I, Librarian” provides a strong option for your open source document management system. Compared to the other EDMS products on this list, “I, Librarian” does not have the widest range of software functions, it does one thing, and it does that one thing very well: organizing your collection of PDFs. It also provides PDF annotation using a browser interface, and makes it easy to find documents using full-text search.
“I, Librarian” is built with PHP for both the backend/API and frontend web client, and does not use a database. Files are stored on the server’s filesystem.
I, Librarian - Key Features
Online, centrally managed PDF organization
Web-based user interface
In-browser PDF viewer with annotation
Documents are hosted on a web server, accessed from anywhere, and easy to export or migrate
Includes advanced auditing feature - user activity logs
Offers a no-install service when using the web-based options.
Web interface for the cloud version
I, Librarian - Offerings and Pricing
Self-Hosted
FREE
Can run on local computer or a server, with installers for Windows and downloadable distributable source for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
UPDATE: while the website is not working and there has not been any update since September 2, 2023, it's not yet clear if this project is still active or not.
Papermerge is a great option if you need a basic open-source document management system that focuses primarily on importing, processing, and storing scanned documents. Papermerge offers a wide range of features, including drag-and-drop document importing, automatic metadata extraction using optical character recognition (OCR), version control, and full-text search. This system also integrates with a number of popular applications. Papermerge is easy to install, with one-click installation on most major Linux distributions.
Papermerge is built with Django (Python) for the backend/API and EmberJS for the frontend web client, and uses PostgreSQL for its database. Files are stored on the server’s filesystem.
Self-hosting Papermerge is a great option for personal use or small business, as all features are available for free.
Papermerge - Key Features
Multi-user permissions and capabilities
Task automation
Easy document scanner import
Optical Character Recognition and metadata import
Can accommodate various paper documents (such as A4 or long receipts)
Easy page reordering within a document
Flexible permission system
Direct email attachment import
Papermerge - Offerings and Pricing
Self-Hosted
FREE
Can run on local computer or a server, using Python and Poetry.
Choosing the best open source document management system for your business can be a challenge. However, with so many great options available, it is sure to find one that fits your specific needs. We've highlighted five of our favorites in this article, but there are several others available. Ultimately, you may decide to try out a few of these options to see what might be the best fit, since you can set most of them up in minutes.
For some organizations, a small and lightweight EDMS will do the job. For others, having a more robust enterprise offering is essential. And for all organizations, there will be some features that you will absolutely require, while other features won’t be needed at all.
One of the reasons we see such a wide range of EDMS products is due to such a wide range of customer needs. Ultimately, as with proprietary systems, it’s important to determine exactly what is most important to you, but with open source, you have much better visibility into what each product will be able to do for you.
With the right system in place, you can easily manage your organization's digital and physical documents while knowing that your operational, budget and security needs can all be met.
Try FormKiQ Core today
Get started with FormKiQ through our core offering, which includes all core functionality and is free forever
FormKiQ vs. Off-the-Shelf Software and Less Flexible SaaS When is FormKiQ a better choice than Off-the-Shelf Software and Less Flexible SaaS?
FormKiQ vs. Building It Yourself How does FormKiQ save time over custom in-house solutions?
Use Cases FormKiQ works for small and large workflows, across all verticals and industries.
FormKiQ For Teams Find out how FormKiQ can work for your team
FormKiQ For Industries Discover the advantages FormKiQ can bring to your industry
Blockchain and Decentralized Storage Leverage web3 technologies including proof of work and distributed systems for document control and data privacy
Content and Digital Asset Management Integrate with your preferred web content management system while leveraging FormKiQ for managing your digital assets
Document Management Module Integrate all of the required functionality of a document management system into an existing software solution
Integration with QMS or LIMS Add missing functionality for your Quality Management or Laboratory Information Management by integrating with FormKiQ
Job Application Form Receive applications, including cover letter and resume attachments, and import into an existing HR Management System
Legal Discovery Tool Find information quickly by combining full-text search with AI-powered document classification
The Paperless Office: Digital Document Processing Collect, process, and store paper and digital documents, allowing for archival, integration, and future recall
Product Leasing System Process client lease applications, including a credit check and approval workflow
Company-Wide Break down the silos in your organization with a centralized control center for documents, ready for integration with any and all systems
Engineering and Product Reduce development time and agony with battle-tested components for your applications
Finance and Accounting Process paper and electronic invoices and receipts, ready for integration with your important systems
HR and Recruiting Build and support your people across the organization by integrating with your essential tools
IT and InfoSec Provision a secure document store with the encryption and controls needed for compliance and protection
Legal Manage and safeguard contracts and other essential documents across systems
Marketing Add better discovery and reliability to digital assets and other essential content, while enabling integration with a web content management system
Sales Keep track of sales assets and contracts inside and outside of your CRM and other tools
Accounting, Financial Services, and FinTech Standardize financial documents, metadata, and workflows across systems, teams, auditors, and clients
Education, Training, and EdTech Integrate Learning Management Systems with other essential applications and tools
Healthcare, Life Sciences, and MedTech Combine secure and compliant records management with laboratory information management systems
Law Practices and Legal Services Ensure efficient legal discovery and case management
Logistics and Transportation Provide a robust and customized solution for fleet management or other logistics needs
Manufacturing, Production, and Utilities Control and distribute essential documents and standard operating procedures within and between facilities, partners, and clients
Online Entertainment, Gaming, and Gambling Provide the required compliance documents to partners, customers, and government agencies
Professional and Technical Services Ensure that clients, inspectors, and subcontractors are aligned with consistent document control
Tech Startups Build robust document management functionality into your disruptive product
