Open source HTML to PDF APIs, compared
The free open-source route is Gotenberg: Chromium behind a REST API in one Docker container, MIT license. Self-running Playwright is the other free route. Both are genuinely free and both hand you the engine operations: version upgrades, concurrency, and failure handling are yours. Hosted APIs charge per document instead. The comparison is below, and the per-document prices for the hosted routes are on the best-of page.
The three routes
| Route | Engine | Cost basis | You operate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gotenberg (self-hosted) | Chromium + LibreOffice in Docker | MIT license, your infrastructure | Upgrades, scaling, retries, monitoring |
| Self-run Playwright | Chromium, your code drives it | Free library, your infrastructure | Browser lifecycle, pools, crashes, fonts |
| Hosted per-document APIs | Chromium or Prince, vendor-operated | Per document, flat plans | Nothing beyond the HTTP call |
For the hosted rows, the per-document prices, free tiers, and the catch each vendor buries are measured and printed on the best HTML to PDF APIs page; webcapture's own plans are published on our pricing page. This page stays about the self-hosted routes.
What the free routes really cost
Gotenberg is one container and two commands to start; the running cost is the operations you inherit: tracking Chromium releases, sizing for concurrent renders, queueing burst traffic, and owning every render failure at 2am. Self-running Playwright has the same operations profile plus browser lifecycle code. A hosted call moves those onto the vendor's page of the invoice. Neither is wrong; they are different buyers. If you cannot name who gets paged when rendering breaks, you have chosen self-hosting with nobody on call.
Where the engine question fits
All three routes can run the same Chromium, so fidelity is not the differentiator here; operations and price shape are. Engine differences matter when leaving the browser family: print-CSS engines and WebKit-era tools have different CSS ceilings, covered in our wkhtmltopdf migration guide. If you run Gotenberg today, the head-to-heads Gotenberg vs Puppeteer, Gotenberg vs WeasyPrint, and Gotenberg vs LibreOffice map when the container is the right shape and when it is not.
Method
Checked 2026-09-20 against the Gotenberg repository and the Playwright repository; hosted per-document prices quoted on this page are measured in the best-of comparison. Questions: hello@webcapture.io.
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