Migrate from Puppeteer to PDFgen
Stop running headless Chrome just to make PDFs. Send HTML to one endpoint and get a PDF back — no browser to scale or babysit.
Puppeteer works great until production. Chrome leaks memory, cold starts are slow, serverless bundles balloon past size limits, and someone gets paged at 2am when the render workers fall over. You end up operating a browser fleet just to produce PDFs.
PDFgen takes that off your plate: send your HTML (or an AI-built template) to one endpoint and get a PDF back — no browser to run, scale or patch. Migrating is usually a few lines — swap your page.pdf() pipeline for a single fetch.
What is Puppeteer?
Puppeteer is Google’s library for driving headless Chrome from Node. It’s powerful and free, but you run, scale, patch and monitor the browser yourself — including the memory and cold-start issues that come with it.
Why teams choose PDFgen
No headless browser to run
Rendering is fully hosted. There is no Chrome to launch, scale, patch or monitor — a single REST call returns the PDF binary or a hosted, expiring link.
Reliable under load
No leaking Chrome processes, no cold-start cliffs, no out-of-memory restarts — rendering scales on PDFgen’s side, not in your workers.
AI builds the template
Describe a document in plain English — or upload a sample to start from — and PDFgen generates a reusable template. You skip the blank-page problem instead of hand-coding HTML.
PDFgen vs Puppeteer at a glance
| PDFgen | Puppeteer | |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure | Fully hosted — nothing to run | You run & scale headless Chrome |
| Memory & cold starts | Handled for you | Your problem to manage |
| Serverless footprint | Just an HTTP call | Heavy Chromium bundle |
| Maintenance | None — no Chrome to patch | Patch & monitor Chrome yourself |
| Templating | Handlebars + AI templates | DIY in your own code |
Comparison reflects each product's general approach and may change — check the latest Puppeteer docs for specifics.
Migrating from Puppeteer
Most migrations are a small change: replace your Puppeteer rendering step with a single POST to /api/v1/generate and keep your existing HTML. See the language guides for copy-paste examples in your stack.
Frequently asked questions
- Why migrate off Puppeteer for PDFs?
- Self-hosting headless Chrome means owning memory leaks, cold starts, large serverless bundles and ongoing patching. PDFgen renders for you behind one API, so those operational problems go away.
- Is migrating from Puppeteer hard?
- Usually not. Replace your browser.newPage()/page.pdf() flow with a single POST to /api/v1/generate that sends your HTML; you keep the same markup.
- Can I keep my existing HTML/CSS?
- Yes — send the same HTML you rendered in Puppeteer. Use engine "legacy" to skip templating, or add Handlebars tokens for dynamic data.