Puppeteer Alternative

Renderfy vs Puppeteer

Puppeteer works. But a 300 MB Chromium binary that requires 20 Linux packages and breaks on every serverless deploy is a lot of ops overhead for generating a PDF. Here's the full comparison.

When Puppeteer is still the right choice

Puppeteer is the right tool when you need to interact with a live page — clicking buttons, filling forms, scraping dynamic content, or testing UI flows. It's also a good fit if you're already running a persistent Node.js server with spare memory and you want to keep everything in-process with a reused warm browser instance.

When Renderfy makes more sense

• → You're deploying to a serverless platform (Vercel, AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers) where shipping a 300 MB binary isn't practical.
• → You want to generate PDFs or images from static HTML/Tailwind templates rather than scraping a live URL.
• → You need input types beyond HTML — Markdown, code snippets, charts, diagrams, LaTeX math.
• → You don't want to manage Chrome binary updates, Linux system dependencies, or browser pool sizing.

Side-by-side: generating a PDF

import puppeteer from 'puppeteer';

const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.setContent(html);
const pdf = await page.pdf({
  format: 'A4',
  printBackground: true,
});
await browser.close();
// 300 MB binary, ~20 linux deps,
// breaks in serverless

const res = await fetch(
  'https://renderfy.io/api/v1/render',
  {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
      'Authorization': 'Bearer KEY',
      'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    },
    body: JSON.stringify({
      type: 'tailwind',
      content: html,
      options: { format: 'pdf',
                 dimensions: 'a4' },
    }),
  }
);
const pdf = await res.arrayBuffer();