KeepsakeKeepsake vs Docspell
Docspell is free, open source, and genuinely clever about classifying documents. It also needs a server you run, maintain, back up and secure — which is a hobby, and a fair one, but not a thing most families have.
Is Keepsake or Docspell the better document manager?
Docspell is free and self-hosted, with good OCR and machine-learning auto-tagging, and it demands a server, a database and ongoing maintenance from you. Keepsake costs from £19/year, runs as an ordinary app on Windows, Android and the web, encrypts every document on your device, and syncs through a cloud folder you already own. Choose Docspell if running infrastructure appeals; choose Keepsake if it does not.
| Keepsake | Docspell | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Zero-knowledge vault app | Self-hosted document management server |
| What it costs | Free tier / £19 yr Premium | Free software; your server and time |
| Setup | Install an app | JVM, database, reverse proxy, backups |
| Encrypted at rest by design | Yes, always, on your device | Whatever you configure on the host |
| Vendor can read documents | No — we hold nothing | No vendor at all (you are the vendor) |
| OCR | On-device, Latin plus Urdu/Arabic | Server-side OCR, strong |
| Auto-tagging / classification | Extraction rules, shared across platforms | Machine-learning tagging, strong |
| Expiry alerts & renewals | Yes — 30/7/lapsed, calendar feed | Reminder features, DIY |
| Mobile experience | Native Android app; installable web app | Web UI, community apps |
| If you stop maintaining it | Nothing to maintain | It stops, and your documents with it |
Keepsake prices are in pounds sterling (£); Docspell's are its own published list prices, quoted in their original currency and unconverted.
When Docspell is the better choice
- You already run a home server and enjoy it. Docspell costs nothing, keeps everything in your house, and its classification is good.
- You want to modify the software — it is open source and Keepsake, today, is not.
- You want unlimited scale and an API to script against.
When Keepsake is the better choice
- No server. No Docker, no Postgres, no reverse proxy, no certificate renewal, no backup strategy you invented yourself.
- Encryption is not something you have to configure correctly: it is on, always, before anything is written or synced.
- The family can actually use it — an Android app, a Windows app, an installable web app on an iPhone, and sharing that does not require anyone to reach your LAN.
Questions
Is self-hosting more private than Keepsake?
Only if you do it well. A self-hosted server is private in principle and only as private as its weakest patch, password and backup in practice. Keepsake's ciphertext is unreadable to us and to the cloud it sits in, without you having to secure anything.
Can I keep both?
Yes — some people run Docspell as a bulk archive and use Keepsake for the documents the household actually reaches for, with expiry dates and family access.
Is Keepsake open source?
Not today. The vault format is published byte-for-byte so anyone can write a reader, and making the crypto core source-available is on the plan — an open format is what protects you from us either way.
The honest verdict
Docspell is a good answer for people who like running servers, and a bad answer for everyone else — which is most families. The trade is honest in both directions: they get freedom and no vendor at the cost of being the sysadmin; we take the sysadmin job away by making sure there is nothing to administer and nothing we can read. If the phrase "reverse proxy" is not part of your weekend, that decides it.