COMPARISON · PDFRELAY VS DIY PUPPETEER · 2026-07-13
Puppeteer PDF alternative: PDFRelay vs DIY Chrome (2026)
Puppeteer (and Playwright) are excellent libraries — PDFRelay itself renders with Chromium. The question isn't whether the library works; it's whether you want to own the operational surface around it.
Every team that self-hosts PDF generation ends up maintaining the same stack: a browser pool with memory limits, queueing and retries for crashes, timeouts for runaway pages, SSRF guards for user-supplied URLs, and Chrome version pinning. That's real engineering time spent on plumbing. (And the old shortcut, wkhtmltopdf, was archived in 2023 with unpatched CVEs.)
Feature by feature
| Feature | PDFRelay | DIY Puppeteer |
|---|---|---|
| Setup time | Minutes — one HTTP call | Days: browser pool, queue, retries, monitoring |
| Memory footprint | Zero on your infra | 200–500 MB RAM per Chrome instance |
| Serverless fit | Just an HTTP call | 300–800 ms cold starts, large bundles |
| Crash & retry handling | Built in | You build it |
| SSRF protection for URL rendering | Built in, on by default | You build it (easy to get wrong) |
| Chrome upgrades & CVE patching | Handled | You own it |
| Cost at low volume | Free tier (150 docs/mo) | Free (your infra + your time) |
| Full control / air-gapped | No | Yes — the reason to DIY |
Pricing
| Tier | PDFRelay | DIY Puppeteer |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Free — 150 docs/mo, no card | Library is free; infra + time are not |
| Entry | $12/mo — 1,500 docs | ~1 small VM ($10–20/mo) + maintenance hours |
| Mid | $29/mo — 5,000 docs | Browser pool + queue infra + on-call |
| Upper | $79/mo — 20,000 docs | Dedicated rendering fleet |
Where DIY Puppeteer shines — and where it hurts
STRENGTHS · DIY PUPPETEER
- Complete control over the rendering environment and Chrome flags
- No per-document costs — economical at very large, steady scale
- Documents never leave your infrastructure (compliance/air-gap cases)
TRADE-OFFS · DIY PUPPETEER
- 200–500 MB RAM per instance; heavy documents crash tabs without pooling discipline
- Serverless cold starts (300–800 ms) and binary-size limits make Lambda/Functions painful
- You own security: SSRF guards, Chrome CVE patching, sandbox configuration
- Ongoing maintenance tax — version pinning, flaky renders, queue tuning
Frequently asked
When is DIY Puppeteer the right choice?
Three cases: documents legally can't leave your infrastructure; you render at very large steady volume where a dedicated fleet beats per-document pricing; or PDF generation is core to your product and you want full control. Otherwise the maintenance tax usually outweighs the API cost.
Is PDFRelay's output identical to Puppeteer's page.pdf()?
Effectively yes — PDFRelay renders with Chromium and exposes the same options (format, margins, scale, pageRanges, printBackground, preferCSSPageSize). If your Puppeteer setup produces it, PDFRelay produces it without the browser pool.
What about wkhtmltopdf?
wkhtmltopdf was archived in January 2023 and no longer receives security patches; its WebKit build predates modern CSS. Teams still on it should migrate to a Chromium-based path — either self-hosted Puppeteer/Playwright or an API like PDFRelay.
Can I migrate gradually?
Yes. Keep your Puppeteer path and route a slice of traffic through the API — the request shape is a JSON POST with your existing HTML. Most teams migrate template by template, watching the X-Pdfrelay-Cache and quota headers as they go.
TRY IT · FREE · NO SIGNUP
See your own markup rendered
Paste your template into the free playground and render a proof in seconds — the exact engine the API uses.
More comparisons: PDFRelay vs PDFShift · PDFRelay vs DocRaptor