Description

Mayan EDMS is a free, self-hosted electronic document management system built on Python and Django. It takes scanned pages, PDFs and office files, recognises their text, keeps every version, and files them with the metadata, tags and access rules you define. Beyond storage it models the paperwork itself: documents move through workflows, every action is recorded, and permissions can be set per object and per role. It is aimed at organisations that need the discipline of a commercial DMS without the licence fee.

Key Features

• Document versioning — every revision is kept, older versions can be downloaded or restored, and the uploaded file itself is never altered.
• Non-destructive page editing — reorder, hide, split or join pages, rotate, crop and flip bad scans, and apply redactions as overlays that a separate permission controls.
• Automatic OCR — Tesseract by default, distributable across several workers, with the document language passed to the engine; PDF and office text layers are extracted without OCR.
• Metadata, tags, cabinets and indexes — user-defined metadata per document type, colour-coded tags, nested cabinets, and index trees that rebuild themselves from templates.
• Full-text search — search document content, metadata, name or extension, with pluggable search backends.
• Workflow engine — model approvals and reviews as states with automatic transitions, expirations and escalations, triggering actions in other systems.
• Role-based access control — per-object permissions, unlimited roles, TOTP two-factor authentication, OpenID Connect single sign-on and logged login attempts.
• Many ways in — browser upload, watched folders, IMAP and POP3 mailboxes, SANE scanners and network copiers, with automatic duplicate detection and optional ClamAV scanning.
• AI and API integration — OpenAI or a local Ollama model for summarisation and data extraction, a REST API, and read-only filesystem mirroring of indexes and cabinets.

Why Use It?

Most self-hosted document tools stop at “scan it and search it”. Mayan EDMS covers the whole record lifecycle: who may see a document, which version was approved, and what happened to it afterwards. Versioning, workflow and a complete event log make it a fit where the archive has to stand up to an audit rather than just tidy a pile of paper.

Use Cases

• Invoice, contract and supplier correspondence archive with an approval step
• Legal or case files where versions, permissions and audit history matter
• High-volume scanning and OCR with indexing by year and department
• Departmental archives needing per-role access and redaction of sensitive fields

Related

Compare it with Paperless-ngx, Docspell and Papermerge DMS, or read Paperless-ngx vs Docspell vs Mayan EDMS.