How Renduo compares.
We're the newest player here — react-pdf and Puppeteer have years on us. This is how we think about the trade-off, not a claim that Renduo is strictly better for every case.
| Renduo | @react-pdf/renderer | Puppeteer DIY | Template APIs | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Template language | Your React component (JSX + CSS) | react-pdf's own primitives + a flexbox subset | HTML/CSS you build yourself | Liquid, Jinja, or a proprietary editor |
| Reuses your component? | Yes — the exact one in your app | No — rebuilt from scratch | Only if you build the pipeline | No |
| Own infra required? | No | Yes — runs in your process | Yes — Chromium, queues, retries | No |
| Where does your code run? | Isolated Chrome context, network blocked | Your Node process | Your Chromium instance | The vendor's rendering engine, not your code |
| Versioning | Immutable — push creates a new version | Whatever your git history gives you | Whatever your git history gives you | Varies by vendor |
| Entry price | Free — 100 PDFs/month | Free (open source) | Free + your infra cost | Typically $15–$49/month |
Objections we expect
Why not @react-pdf/renderer?
It's a great library, but it doesn't reuse your component — you rebuild it with react-pdf's own primitives (Document, View, Text) and a flexbox subset. That's the same duplication as Liquid, just expressed in JSX, and it still runs on your infra. If your document is simple and you already have the infra, react-pdf is free and it's a fine choice.
Isn’t this just Puppeteer with extra steps?
Correct — that's the point. Puppeteer is the renderer, not the solution. What's left after you pick it: concurrency, timeouts, Chromium memory leaks, queues, retries, template versioning, storage. That's a second product you maintain next to your actual one.
What about DocRaptor / PDFMonkey / CraftMyPDF?
Mature products, more years in the category than Renduo has. The difference is at the entry point: they all ask you to build the document in their language or their editor. That's exactly the step Renduo removes. If your templates already work in Liquid, migrating probably doesn't pay off — this is for teams starting from a React component they already have.
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