Powell Software vs Paperless-ngx

3.0.0 landed on July 22 after a long beta, carrying both the largest feature set in the project's history and nine breaking changes. The four releases since are pure repair: a broken migration in 3.0.1 that required an immediate 3.0.2, then two patch rounds covering OCR skipping, permission-filtered document dedup, Gotenberg conversion, email date parsing and search index edge cases. The pace tells you 3.0 shipped into real deployments fast.

The project has moved from a document scanner-and-tagger to a document platform with AI in the core: Paperless AI, remote OCR via Azure, a document parser plugin framework, tantivy replacing Whoosh for search, file versions and sharelink bundles. The breaking changes are the other half of that story — dropping API v1, Python 3.10, document encryption and the old consumer clears the decks for that platform. Recent patches keep touching LLM plumbing, including passing output language into chat and adding docstrings so the classifier reads better as an LLM tool.

Expect the 3.0.x patch cadence to continue for another few rounds before feature work resumes; the migration and OCR regressions are the ones still surfacing.