head to head · open source
pdfcpu vs community
pdfcpu has 8,895 GitHub stars, 644 forks, 121 open issues and last shipped yesterday. community has 2,425 stars, 237 forks, 46 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. pdfcpu leads on adoption by 267% (8,895 vs 2,425 stars). pdfcpu is written in Go under Apache-2.0; community is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0. pdfcpu has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, community 10%. pdfcpu was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (go), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| pdfcpu | community | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 8.9K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-05-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 644 | ⑂ 237 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick pdfcpu if
- You weight community size — 8.9K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick community if
- You want the community feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and community fits your workflow better
About pdfcpu
pdfcpu: PDF tooling for Go and the command line pdfcpu is a PDF processing library and command line tool written in Go. It supports validation, optimization, encryption, signing, document assembly, content extraction, and other common PDF operations. pdfcpu supports PDF versions through PDF 2.0 (ISO 32000 2). PDF 2.0 validation support is basic and continuously improving. Horst Rutter, the maintainer of pdfcpu, is a member of the PDF Association. Installation Usage CLI Validate a PDF: Merge two PDFs: Go API See API documentation for usage examples. Features Validate, optimize, split, trim, and merge PDFs Extract…
read the full pdfcpu overview →
About community
Documize Community is an open source, modern, self hosted, enterprise grade knowledge management solution. Built for technical and non technical users Designed to unify both customer facing and internal documentation Organization through labels, spaces and categories It's built with Golang + EmberJS and compiled down to a single executable binary that is available for Linux, Windows and Mac. All you need to provide is your database PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server or any MySQL variant. Latest Release Community edition: v5.14.0 Community+ edition: v5.14.0 The Community+ edition is the "enterprise" offering with…
read the full community overview →
More in Business Software
Related comparisons
More Document Management & E-Signatures projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Document Management & E-Signatures field.
Frequently asked questions
Is pdfcpu or community more popular?
pdfcpu has 8,895 GitHub stars and community has 2,425. pdfcpu has the larger community by that measure.
Are pdfcpu and community free?
Both are open source. pdfcpu is licensed under Apache-2.0 and community under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between pdfcpu and community?
pdfcpu is written in Go and community in JavaScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, pdfcpu or community?
Choose pdfcpu if you want the larger community (8,895 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose community if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.