Mayan EDMS Review: The most advanced, scalable, and mature open…

Mayan EDMS

The most advanced, scalable, and mature open source document management system

Document Management www.mayan-edms.com

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Founded

2010

Starting Price

Free

About Mayan EDMS

Mayan EDMS is a free, open source electronic document management system in continuous development since 2010. Self-hosted and built on Python/Django, it provides OCR, document versioning, fine-grained permissions, configurable workflows, and a full REST API, and is trusted by government, NGO, academic, and commercial organizations to manage hundreds of millions of documents. The software is free; Mayan EDMS LLC sells optional support plans and custom contracts.

Pros & Cons

Pros

Completely free and open source software with no license fees, user limits, or document limits
Exceptionally mature - in uninterrupted active development since 2010 with 10M+ downloads and 100+ contributors
Proven scalability, handling hundreds of millions of documents daily across hundreds of thousands of installations
Powerful workflow engine, fine-grained permissions, and full REST API rival commercial enterprise DMS platforms
Self-hosted deployment gives full data sovereignty - trusted by government, banking, military, and healthcare sectors

Key Features

Document Versioning

Every document keeps a full version history, so changes can be tracked and earlier versions restored at any time

OCR & Full-Text Search

Built-in optical character recognition extracts text from scanned documents and makes entire archives searchable

Document Workflows

State-based workflow engine automates document approval, review, and routing processes with conditional transitions

Fine-Grained Permissions

Role-based access control lets administrators grant permissions per document, document type, or organizational unit

Metadata & Tagging

Custom metadata types, tags, and cabinets organize documents and drive automatic indexing structures

REST API

Comprehensive REST API exposes the full feature set for integrations and embedding document management into other products

Web-Based Setup

Fully browser-based administration and configuration with a comprehensive settings system - no desktop client required

Pricing

Community

Free

Full open source software
All features included
Self-hosted on your infrastructure
Community resources
No user or document limits imposed by license

Best For

Government Records Management

Local, state, and national government agencies use Mayan EDMS to manage official records with audit trails, retention workflows, and strict role-based access control on sovereign infrastructure.

Compliance-Heavy Industries

Banking, insurance, and aerospace organizations self-host Mayan to keep sensitive documents on-premises while meeting regulatory requirements for versioning, permissions, and traceability.

Going Paperless

Organizations digitize paper archives by scanning documents into Mayan, where built-in OCR makes every page full-text searchable and metadata keeps archives organized.