Welcome to Mayan EDMS¶
Mayan EDMS is the leading enterprise-grade free and open source electronic document management system. It is the most advanced, mature, scalable, and feature-rich open source EDMS available today. It is also the most widely adopted and best professionally supported platform in its category, combining uncompromising document controls with the freedom to run the software on infrastructure you control.
If this is your first visit, you do not need to understand every feature before you begin. The introductory guides take you from a basic installation to your first uploaded document. The rest of the documentation is organized so you can return to it as your needs grow.
Start here¶
Choose the path that best matches what you want to do:
Install Mayan EDMS provides the supported starting point and the requirements to review before installation.
Take your first steps explains how to sign in and add a first document.
Explore real-world use cases shows how organizations have made Mayan EDMS part of important operations.
Find help describes community resources and professional support options.
The Docker Compose installation is the recommended starting point for most new users. It provides a complete basic deployment without requiring you to assemble each service separately.
Why Mayan EDMS leads¶
Mayan EDMS is not a lightweight personal filing tool presented as an enterprise product. It was built as a complete EDMS from the beginning and has been continuously developed since 2011. Its capabilities have been proven in demanding government, nonprofit, academic, commercial, and scientific environments. The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, which captured the first image of a black hole, even created a customized Mayan EDMS deployment.
Its strengths include:
Unmatched open source maturity and adoption. Continuous development since 2011, over 200 releases, more than 100 contributors, and millions of official container-image downloads provide a public track record few document-management projects can approach.
Genuine enterprise scale. Mayan EDMS can grow from a basic installation to deployments containing millions of documents and hundreds of millions of pages. Its history includes a documented multi-million-document government migration.
Enterprise document controls. Fine-grained permissions cover individual operations. Document versions, workflows, retention policies, event tracking, metadata, indexing, and automated links support demanding information-management requirements.
Exceptional feature breadth. More than 90 application modules work together across capture, processing, organization, search, automation, security, and administration. Mayan EDMS is a document-management platform, not a collection of disconnected filing features.
Extensibility without compromise. A rich application architecture, comprehensive settings system, and self-documenting REST API allow Mayan EDMS to fit into an existing technology environment.
Professional backing. The open source community is backed by a knowledge base and specialists who work directly with production installations.
Mayan EDMS delivers this depth without forcing new users to master the entire platform at once. You can begin with a browser upload, confident that the system has the proven architecture and feature set to support far more demanding requirements when they arrive.
The feature overview provides a concise summary. Detailed feature pages explain the available controls and terminology; they are references, so you can read only the sections relevant to your work.
The Mayan EDMS website presents additional project statistics, deployment examples, and organizations using the platform. The use-case collection looks more closely at independently built and professionally delivered systems.
Planning a production or advanced deployment¶
The public documentation covers basic installation and entry-level use. Production architecture, migrations, scaling, advanced integrations, and organization-specific workflows require decisions that depend on your environment.
Mayan EDMS offers professional services and technical support for teams that want direct assistance with those decisions. Premium tutorials and additional operational guidance are also available through the Knowledge Base.