Comparison · react-pdf
react-pdf, or a report designer?
Both produce a PDF from a React app. They answer different questions: react-pdf is how a developer writes a document in code, and BroadPaper is how your users design their own and you still ship a print-perfect file.
Choose react-pdf when
- Your developers define every document in JSX, and users never change a layout
- You want a free, MIT-licensed library and are happy to build any editing yourself
- The documents are few, stable, and owned by engineering
Choose BroadPaper when
- Customers or colleagues need to change reports without a release
- Every tenant wants its own branding, fonts and layout
- You would otherwise build and maintain a report editor, a data-binding layer and a paginator
- You need the same layout on screen and in the file, down to where a table breaks
Side by side
| react-pdf | BroadPaper | |
|---|---|---|
| Who designs the document | A developer, in React components (Document, Page, View, Text, Image, Link). | 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 primitives with a flexbox layout (Yoga). It does not render HTML or CSS. | Blocks rendered as the browser lays text out, measured and paginated by BroadPaper, then drawn by the PDF engine at the same widths. |
| Data | Whatever props you pass to your components. | Your data schemas, declared once. Users bind fields and build calculations from steps; expressions are statically checked against the schema. No eval. |
| Pagination | Automatic page wrapping with page-break control on elements. | 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. |
| Tables | No table component; composed from Views. | A table block with repeated headers, totals, column widths and long tables split across pages. |
| Where the PDF is made | Browser or Node. | Browser or Node through a WebAssembly engine, no Chromium needed — 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. |
A react-pdf document is code, and a BroadPaper report is data — a JSON template with bindings — so there is no automatic conversion. Teams usually keep their fixed documents where they are and use BroadPaper for the ones users need to change.
What other products do is summarised from their own sites, checked 15 September 2026: react-pdf, react-pdf 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.