Gotenberg

What is Gotenberg?

Gotenberg is an open source, Docker-based API for converting documents to PDF. You send it HTML, a URL, Markdown, or Office files over a REST call and it returns a PDF — bundling Chromium, LibreOffice, and PDF tooling in one container so you don’t manage those dependencies yourself. It’s written in Go and licensed MIT.

What is Gotenberg best for?

Developers who need reliable document-to-PDF generation as a service — invoices, reports, tickets, and exports — without wiring up headless Chromium or LibreOffice by hand. It fits any stack: your app POSTs a file or HTML template and gets back a PDF, so the same service works for a Node, Python, PHP, or Java backend.

What can Gotenberg do?

• Convert HTML, a live URL, or Markdown to PDF using headless Chromium, with JavaScript execution for dynamic pages
• Convert Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and 100+ other Office formats via LibreOffice
• Merge, split, rotate, and flatten existing PDFs
• Produce PDF/A and PDF/UA compliant output for archival and accessibility
• Add watermarks, stamps, encryption, and edit PDF metadata
• Capture screenshots of web pages
• Return results via webhook and read/write files directly from S3, MinIO, or Google Cloud Storage

Where does Gotenberg fall short?

• LibreOffice conversions are single-threaded. One LibreOffice instance can’t run parallel conversions because of its lock mechanism, so heavy Office-to-PDF workloads bottleneck on a single instance and need horizontal scaling across containers.
• Chromium’s rendering has limits. Complex print CSS, precise page-break control, and pixel-perfect layouts can behave differently than a dedicated print engine — DocRaptor uses PrinceXML precisely for that fidelity.
• It’s HTTP-first, not a library. Every conversion is a network round-trip to a running service, which adds latency and an operational dependency compared with an in-process PDF library, and each Chromium instance wants roughly 512 MB–1 GB of RAM.

Is Gotenberg free?

Yes — Gotenberg is fully free and open source under the MIT license, with no paid tier, edition split, or usage limits. You only pay for the server or container hosting you run it on. There is no official managed cloud; you host it yourself.

What does Gotenberg replace?

Gotenberg is a self-hosted alternative to hosted PDF APIs like CloudConvert, DocRaptor, and Adobe PDF Services. Instead of paying per document or per conversion, you run one container and convert as much as your hardware allows. For broader file-conversion needs beyond PDF, ConvertX covers images, audio, and video, and Docling focuses on parsing documents into structured data.

FAQ

Is Gotenberg open source? Yes. Gotenberg is released under the MIT license — a permissive OSI-approved license — so you can use, modify, and self-host it freely, including in commercial products.

Can I self-host Gotenberg for free? Yes. It’s distributed as a Docker image and runs anywhere Docker does; the software is free and you only pay for the hosting it runs on.

Is Gotenberg a good CloudConvert or DocRaptor alternative? For teams that want to avoid per-document pricing and keep data on their own infrastructure, yes. If you need a managed SLA or PrinceXML-grade print fidelity with zero ops, a hosted API may fit better.

What do I need to run Gotenberg? Just Docker. The official image bundles Chromium, LibreOffice, and the PDF engines; budget around 512 MB–1 GB of RAM per Chromium instance and scale out with more containers for heavy Office workloads.