Prince
Prince pioneered HTML-to-PDF technology with the first release of PrinceXML in 2003 and has been leading the category ever since. The chairman of Prince (and the inventor of CSS), Håkon Wium Lie, also wrote the first CSS Paged Media W3C specifications, which enable much of Prince and DocRaptor’s unique HTML-to-PDF functionality. DocRaptor's primary difference versus Prince is our lower starting price point and instant scalability.
Headless Chromium
Google Chrome provides modern CSS and JavaScript support and a strong developer community. The most popular Headless Chrome libraries include Puppeteer, electron-pdf, and Athena. It's an excellent choice for simple PDFs or PDFs generated from complex JavaScript, but its web-centric focus makes it struggle with complex PDF functionality such as PDF-specific styling, floats, JavaScript, accessibility, etc. Chrome's memory usage may also increase your infrastructure cost and scalability requirements.
Other APIs
There are countless HTML-to-PDF API alternatives available on the internet. Most of them are significantly cheaper than DocRaptor, but that's because they're all based on Headless Chrome and generally managed by companies less focused on reliability and security. These other APIs will struggle with complex PDFs.
Weasyprint
Weasyprint is the only major HTML-to-PDF library not based on a browser. While it lacks JavaScript and PDF form support, it does offer more PDF-focused functionality than Headless Chrome. It still falls far behind Prince and DocRaptor's capabilities.
wkhtmltopdf / PhantomJS
Historically, wkhtmltopdf and PhantomJS were the primary open-source HTML-to-PDF libraries. Now, they're both deprecated, buggy, lacking support for modern CSS, have poor typography, and are a pain to install. Stick with the Headless Chrome-based libraries.
We created DocRaptor because we weren’t satisfied with any of the alternatives. It is a terrific HTML-to-PDF API, and likely to be the most cost-effective solution for most PDF conversion projects when you consider the total project.