I can't attest to any as I don't use PDFs this way, but here are a few links:
All of these are self-hostable and FOSS. I'm not sure about NextCloud integration.
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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I don't use PDFs that much either, and often wonder who are these people who use so many PDFs, but I hear raves about Stirling PDF. I thought PDFs were like legacy gen.
You don't interact much with lawyers and government in your work, I take it?
I try to keep lawyers, government, and other ne'er-do-wells off my farm, yes.
I will look into these, do you know if they support collaborative annotations?
Stirling PDF
https://docs.stirlingpdf.com/Functionality/Read-and-Annotate/
Read & Annotate is a full-featured PDF viewer that lets you:
- Read PDFs in a clean, focused interface
- Add annotations, comments, and notes
- Highlight and markup text
- Draw freehand on pages
- Add shapes, arrows, and callouts
- Insert text boxes and sticky notes
- Collaborate by marking up documents
- Save annotated PDFs for sharing
Think of it as your digital PDF notepad - read, review, and mark up documents all in one place.
It says it do. Other than that, I've never deployed it.
I have an installation of Stirling PDF, but in my short experiment it had no ability to collaborate on the same document.
Every edit created a new copy of the document downloaded to the user. The annotations weren't tagged to the individual user and sending different versions of a PDF from user to user is not what I am looking for.
Stirling is a single user software in that regards. I haven't tested the also mentioned BentoPDF but I suspect it to be the same as it is also trying to be a PDF toolbox like Acrobat. PdfDing has a slightly different approach it might be an option if OnlyOffice does not work out.
Hmmmm...sorry to steer you wrongly. I mean, gosh it says it does all annotation and collaboration. I assumed 'collaboration' to mean multi-user collaboration. Hard to collaborate by yourself.
I am thankful for any input. Maybe it helps someone else looking for a similar thing.
I think the collaborative part means sending PDFs from user to user and maintaining the ability to edit annotations. That may work for many use cases - a lot of businesses may be fine with that when email is still the communication medium of choice.
My team does this, but we collaborate in Markdown, and then one of us converts it into a PDF when we finish.
That's not an option unfortunately. The actual use case is a non-profit sports club magazine which needs to be proof read by several people at the same time. There is a fixed release date and only a few days to proof read the PDF before it needs to be sent to print.
I think OnlyOffice supports that. There is an extension for that for Nextcloud.
I have installed OnlyOffice Community Edition and it seems to work. I need to test it with a few others over a real connection (not just locally), but it seems promising.
~~I tried that. It opens PDFs in Impress (their PowerPoint) and provides only a very basic annotation interface.~~
I was wrong. I was using Nextcloud Office not OnlyOffice.
OnlyOffice doesn't have "Impress". I think you are confusing that with LibreOffice or Collabora Office.
You might be right.
I think you may be thinking of LibreOffice
will you want version control ?
Not necessary, no.