head to head · open source
PyMuPDF vs papermill
PyMuPDF has 10,744 GitHub stars, 800 forks, 58 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. papermill has 6,485 stars, 462 forks, 196 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. PyMuPDF leads on adoption by 66% (10,744 vs 6,485 stars). PyMuPDF is written in Python under AGPL-3.0; papermill is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. PyMuPDF has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, papermill 7%. PyMuPDF was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (python), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| PyMuPDF | papermill | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 11K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-07-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 800 | ⑂ 462 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick PyMuPDF if
- You weight community size — 11K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick papermill if
- You want the papermill feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and papermill fits your workflow better
About PyMuPDF
PyMuPDF is a high performance Python library, built on the MuPDF C engine, for extracting, analysing, converting, rendering and manipulating PDF and other documents, aimed at Python developers building data extraction, document processing and AI retrieval pipelines.
read the full PyMuPDF overview →
About papermill
Papermill is a Python tool published under the BSD 3 Clause licence by the nteract project that parameterizes, executes, and analyzes Jupyter notebooks, and it is aimed at teams who need to run the same notebook repeatedly with different inputs inside data pipelines.
read the full papermill overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is PyMuPDF or papermill more popular?
PyMuPDF has 10,744 GitHub stars and papermill has 6,485. PyMuPDF has the larger community by that measure.
Are PyMuPDF and papermill free?
Both are open source. PyMuPDF is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and papermill under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between PyMuPDF and papermill?
PyMuPDF is written in Python and papermill in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, PyMuPDF or papermill?
Choose PyMuPDF if you want the larger community (10,744 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose papermill if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.