Skip to main content

Deckle vs Puppeteer / Playwright

Puppeteer (and Playwright) are the most common approaches to PDF generation — run headless Chrome, navigate to a page, and call page.pdf(). Deckle uses the same underlying technology but wraps it in a managed API so you don’t have to operate browser infrastructure.

Feature Comparison

Code Comparison

Puppeteer (Self-Hosted)

Deckle

When to Choose Puppeteer

  • You need full browser automation (screenshots, scraping, testing)
  • You have strict data residency requirements and can’t use cloud APIs
  • You’re already operating browser infrastructure at scale

When to Choose Deckle

  • You want to generate PDFs without managing infrastructure
  • You need batch generation, templates, or React-to-PDF support
  • You want to go from zero to working PDFs in minutes, not days
  • You need multi-language SDK support (Python, Go, Ruby)