Puppeteer alternative for generating PDFs

Puppeteer gives you the same Chromium rendering — plus a browser to install, patch, scale and keep from leaking memory. This is the same engine without the operations.

Rendering with Puppeteer starts simple: launch a browser, open a page, call page.pdf(). Production is where the work appears. Chromium needs its system dependencies, a sandbox decision, and enough memory headroom; crashed browsers have to be noticed and restarted; concurrent renders need a pool, because one browser per request will bury a small server.

None of that is difficult, but it is infrastructure you now own, and it is why teams eventually move rendering behind an HTTP call. The engine is identical — the difference is who keeps it alive.

If you are already running Puppeteer happily at low volume, there is no urgent reason to change. The case for moving is when render traffic grows, or when the browser starts appearing in your incident reports.