Best Free Alternative of jsPDF – Top Tools Reviewed

Part 1：What Makes a Good Free jsPDF Alternative?

A great library should support:

• Clean layouts including tables, fonts, styles
• Browser and/or server compatibility
• Fast rendering and optimized file size
• Reliable documentation and active community support
• Flexible control to suit simple or complex projects
• Free usage without tight limitations

Part 2：Top Free Alternatives to jsPDF

When jsPDF doesn’t provide the exact formatting flexibility, performance, or document structure you need, the good news is that there are powerful open-source and freemium PDF libraries available.

Below is a review of the top 5 free alternative to jsPDF, based on testing real project use cases including invoice generation, multi-page reports, tables, embedded fonts, and HTML-to-PDF conversion.

1. PDFMake

Best choice for: Applications requiring structured layout control, such as invoices, detailed reports, and multi-column documents.

PDFMake is one of the closest replacements in the discussion of pdfmake vs jspdf. It uses a clean JSON-style document definition, which offers much better logical structure for large multi-page documents.

Key Features:

• Advanced table rendering with styling support
• Multi-column layouts
• Image embedding
• Unicode and custom font support
• Browser and Node.js compatibility

Official Website:PDFMake

2. html2pdf.js

Best choice for: Converting existing HTML elements directly into downloadable PDFs without restructuring layouts.

html2pdf.js works as a wrapper around html2canvas and jsPDF, allowing developers to capture the exact visual state of a webpage and turn it into a PDF. It is especially helpful when the goal is to preserve UI styling, images, and layout using only client-side JavaScript.

Key Features

• Quick HTML-to-PDF generation for any on-screen element
• Maintains CSS styles, images, and layout consistency
• Ideal for generating PDFs entirely in the browser
• Minimal setup using CDN or NPM with a simple API

Github link: html2pdf.js

3. Puppeteer

Best choice for: Server-side PDF generation with exact visual rendering of modern HTML/CSS.

Puppeteer is commonly used in professional web applications where automated PDF creation is required. It uses Google’s Headless Chrome, which allows PDFs to be rendered exactly like printed web pages. It's the best pdfkit alternative python.

Key Features:

• Full CSS print rules, including page breaks
• Automated batch PDF creation
• Support for JavaScript execution before rendering
• High output accuracy for business or legal documents

Official site: Puppeteer

4. PDF-LIB

Best choice for: Programmatic editing and enhancement of existing PDF files.

While jsPDF mainly focuses on generating PDFs from scratch, pdf-lib is engineered for document manipulation.

It is widely preferred in web apps that need operations like adding annotations, signatures, or reorganizing pages dynamically. Its strong compatibility with both browser and Node.js environments makes it ideal for SaaS platforms and internal systems.

Key Features

• Insert, delete, merge, and reorder pages
• Add text, shapes, SVGs, images, watermarks, and digital signatures
• Fill and modify PDF form fields dynamically
• Maintain vector precision for superior print quality
• Zero external dependencies lightweight bundle

Official site : PDF-LIB

5. DocRaptor

Best choice for: Professional publishing, compliance-grade print PDFs, and business reporting.

DocRaptor uses the powerful PrinceXML rendering engine, known for providing the most accurate HTML/CSS-to-PDF transformation in production environments. This makes it a strong choice for sectors where branding precision and regulatory structure are crucial like finance, healthcare, or government documentation.

It also excels with long documents containing images, tables, page numbers, and footnotes, outperforming browser-based renderers.

Key Features

• Industry-standard CSS support including pagination control
• Footnotes, headers, footers, and page number automation
• Handles complex layouts and multi-page tables
• Accessible via REST API secure and scalable
• Supports PDF/A for compliance environments

Official website:DocRaptor

Part 3: Performance and Usability Comparison

This section compares key points you care about when choosing free jsPDF alternatives. We look at speed, PDF output quality, ease of use, and platform support. This helps you pick the right library for your web or server project.

Rendering Quality

PDF output quality varies significantly depending on how the library processes HTML and graphics:

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Speed (generation time and resource usage)

1. html2pdf.js

html2pdf.js works directly in the browser. It is fast for short pages and small content. But long pages can slow down the browser or fail to render because it uses a large canvas.

2. pdfmake

pdfmake is fast for structured documents like invoices and reports.

It becomes slower when handling very large tables or many images.

Still, it uses fewer resources than tools that launch a browser.

3. Puppeteer

Puppeteer creates high-quality PDFs, but it uses more CPU and memory.

Starting a headless browser takes time.

It is not the best choice for big batches unless the server has strong hardware.

4. pdf-lib

pdf-lib is fast for editing existing PDFs or merging files. It does not convert HTML to PDF, so speed stays good only for simple tasks.

5. DocRaptor (powered by Prince)

DocRaptor converts HTML to PDF on the server, not in the browser.

Speed is stable even for long documents and large files.

Since rendering happens in the cloud, it avoids browser limits and performance issues.

Learning Curve & Development Effort

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Platform Support: Web vs Server

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Community, Maintenance, and Troubleshooting Resources

Developer threads and issue trackers show recurring patterns: html2canvas/html2pdf issues around canvas size and CSS cloning; Puppeteer threads about binary download size and headless quirks; pdf-lib and pdfmake maintainers field practical API-usage questions on GitHub. These resources are useful for debugging and indicate active maintenance.

For comparative reading and practical recommendations, community posts and technical blogs are valuable (Dev.to, LogRocket, Medium, Stack Overflow).

Real-world benchmarks caution that Puppeteer’s CPU/memory usage is higher than specialized converters, so factor infrastructure cost into vendor choice.

Part 5: Managing PDFs After Creation

Even after creating a PDF with a free jsPDF alternative, the job isn’t always done. You may need to fix text errors, rearrange pages, make scanned PDFs searchable with OCR, or add password protection for security. Most generation tools don’t support these essential editing features.

This is where Tenorshare PDNob becomes the perfect companion. It allows you to edit text directly on the PDF, merge or split pages, extract information, and apply security protections. PDNob keeps everything in one place, so you can edit and secure pdf easily without switching tools. It even includes an AI chat to chat and extract information.

Advantages of PDNob

• Edit text, images, watermarks, links easily.
• Recognize scanned PDFs with high-accuracy OCR (e.g., 99%+) and make them searchable.
• Merge, split, reorder pages and batch-process many files at once.
• Convert PDF into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images while preserving layout.
• Protect your PDF with encryption, redaction, watermarks and restrict printing/editing.

How to use Tenorshare PDNob:

• Open that PDF file in PDNob by clicking on open pdf from the main interface.

• Click Edit to correct text/images, adjust layout, add headers/footers, apply watermarks.
  
• If your PDF came from a scan or image, run OCR mode to convert it to searchable/editable text.
• Click on Pages and Merge or split files if you have multiple PDFs to combine or large files to break down.
• Save/export the final PDF and distribute it knowing it looks the way you want and has the protections you need.

Final Thoughts

When creating PDFs for the web, one tool can’t handle everything. The right free alternative of jsPDF depends on your needs fast client-side exports, accurate print layouts, or strong editing features. Each tool offers something different, giving you more choice and flexibility.

And after you generate your file, you still need a way to polish and manage it.Tenorshare PDNob makes that easy with AI-assisted editing and smart PDF tools in one simple interface, keeping your documents clean and professional.

downloads :

PDNob PDF Editor Software- Smarter, Faster, Easier

rated on Trustpilot >

• Instantly read, summarize, and extract insights from PDF
• Convert PDF to 30+ formats like Word, Excel, and images
• Edit text, images, watermarks, links, and backgrounds for PDF
• 99% OCR precision for making scanned PDFs editable and searchable

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