Box vs Paperless-ngx
Box and Paperless-ngx are both document management software. Box is a commercial product from Box, Inc. Paperless-ngx is open source under GPL-3.0, with 47k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Box when
- An enterprise wants secure external file sharing and governance independent of Microsoft or Google.
- Pick Paperless-ngx when
- A household or small office wants to go paperless and can run Docker.
Side by side
Cloud content management with file sharing, collaboration, security controls, retention, e-signature and many integrations.
Turns scanned and emailed documents into a searchable archive with OCR, automatic tagging and matching, and a web interface.
It duplicates what Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace already include for many customers.
You are responsible for backups of your only copy of important documents.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
Self-hosted server
Not published
Python, Django, TypeScript, Angular, PostgreSQL and Redis
Closed source, sold by Box, Inc.
Open source, GPL-3.0 (strong copyleft)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
Use inside your business is unrestricted, but anything you distribute that includes it must be released under the same license.
1.2k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
47k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 4 years ago, latest release v3.4.1.
Other comparisons
More document management systems
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.