Comparison · pdfmake
pdfmake, or a report designer?
pdfmake turns a document-definition object into a PDF, in the browser or on a server, and it does that well. BroadPaper starts one step earlier: your users design the document, and the SDK turns their design and your data into the file.
Choose pdfmake when
- Developers write the document definition and users never change a layout
- You want a free, MIT-licensed library with no designer to host
- Your documents are mostly text, tables and columns in a fixed arrangement
Choose BroadPaper when
- Users need to design or restyle reports without a developer
- You want charts, branded themes and rich text a person can edit
- You are about to build an editor that writes pdfmake definitions — which is building a report designer
Side by side
| pdfmake | BroadPaper | |
|---|---|---|
| Who designs the document | A developer, as a nested document-definition object with styles. | An embeddable visual designer your users work in: drag, bind to your data, brand, preview. React and Angular wrappers over one framework-free mount API. |
| Layout | Its own layout: tables with auto, fixed and star widths, columns, headers and footers, table of contents. | Blocks laid out as the browser lays text out, so the designer, the preview and the PDF agree. |
| Data | Values you place into the definition in code. | Declared data schemas that users bind to, with calculations built from steps and checked against the schema. |
| Pagination | Automatic, with custom page breaks and dynamic headers and footers. | BroadPaper's own paginator: keep-together, keep-with-next, orphans and widows, repeated table headers, explicit breaks and multi-column splits, decided before any PDF backend draws a page. |
| Fonts | Embedded through a virtual file system. | Declared once in the theme, measured and embedded from the same TrueType bytes. |
| Where the PDF is made | Browser or Node. | Browser or Node through a WebAssembly engine, or a render service over HTTP with a .NET client. |
| Licence | MIT, free. | Commercial, per organisation, yearly. Free to evaluate with every feature; PDFs carry an evaluation mark until licensed. No seats, no activation, no telemetry. |
What other products do is summarised from their own sites, checked 15 September 2026: pdfmake on GitHub. Tell us at hello@broadpaper.com if something here has changed.
See it before you decide.
The demo is the whole designer, in your browser, with no account and nothing uploaded — and the quick start is thirty lines to a designer in your own app.