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Aspose Alternative to PDF Generation

Published Jan 19, 2019

Intro

Aspose PDF is a popular product for PDF creation and manipulation. Among the features it boasts include extracting text from PDFs, modifying the content of PDFs, and converting PDFs to any number of file formats. Add or remove watermarks, populate form field data, add headings and tables of contents. The list goes on.

All this comes with a hefty price tag though. At the time of the writing of this blog post, the Aspose.PDF product starts at $999 for the common programming languages like .NET, Java, and C++.

No doubt, if you need many of those features described above, then Aspose.PDF is the way to go.

However, if you are looking really just for the basics:

  • Convert HTML to PDF
  • Convert a Web Page to PDF
  • Merge PDFs together
  • Convert a Microsoft Office Doc or Image to PDF
  • Generate barcodes and QR codes

…then Aspose.PDF is probably overkill, and overpriced.

Alternative to Aspose.PDF for HTML to PDF / Office Doc to PDF

API2PDF is a REST API that only charges $1/mo + usage for converting HTML to PDF, URLs to PDF, merging PDFs together, and converting office docs to PDF. The API is built on AWS Lambda, a serverless architecture that allows you to generate PDFs at massive scale for a fraction of the cost.

API2PDF is a wrapper for PDF rendering engines Headless Chrome, wkhtmltopdf, LibreOffice, and Zebra Crossing (ZXING).

We offer client libraries in many languages including .NET, Java, Python, PHP, and Node. View our github here and check out our documentation here.

Conclusion

If you need all of those fancy PDF manipulation functionality, Aspose.PDF might justify its $999 price tag. But if you’re just generating PDFs from HTML, merging them together, or converting from some office documents, API2PDF should be more than sufficient for your needs.