Compared honestly
We compare on the things we measured: offline, extraction, totals, statements, one-time price. Where a competitor does something we have not measured against, we say nothing about being better at it.
| Category | Examples | Price | What they do not do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted document managers | Paperless-ngx (with paperless-ai / -gpt add-ons) | Free; Docker on Linux | No money extraction, no statement parsing, no arithmetic; a sysadmin-grade setup |
| Mac prosumer tools | DEVONthink 4, Hazel 6 | One-time, US$42–$499 plus yearly updates | macOS only; no receipt fields or totals |
| Cloud receipt capture | Dext, Hubdoc, Neat, Shoeboxed, Expensify | US$5–29 per user per month, or $97–797 a year; Hubdoc free inside Xero | Every document leaves your machine |
| Local “chat with your PDFs” | AnythingLLM, LM Studio, Jan, GPT4All, Msty | Free to about US$10 | Generic chat over files; no reading pipeline, no classification, no fields, no totals |
| Built into the OS | Windows Copilot in Explorer, Copilot+ search, Apple Intelligence | Included | Cloud or NPU-only; find-and-summarise, never extract-and-total |
| Australian sole-trader apps | ATO myDeductions, Ozly, Sole | Free to about A$15 a month | Cloud; tax-aware but no document intelligence |
Prices as researched in September 2026 from the vendors’ own pages; they change. Nothing here is a claim about those products’ quality.
About Paperless-ngx
Paperless-ngx is free, well made, and good at what it does: OCR, tagging and search over a document archive you host yourself. If you are comfortable running Docker on a Linux box, it may be all you need.
DocuAI is the version for a Windows PC without Docker, and it adds the money part: vendor, date and amount from every receipt and invoice, every statement row as a transaction, totals computed in a database, and an assistant that answers with those totals rather than a guess. That is the difference you are paying for.
Cloud receipt apps
Dext, Hubdoc and the others are built for the accountant channel and they do that job. Their trade is a monthly fee and your documents on their servers. DocuAI is the private archive you keep before anything goes to Xero or your accountant: the originals stay on your disk, and what you hand over is a clean CSV.