Rotativa.io vs Rotativa

date Mar 15, 2017

I got this question lately: why should I use Rotativa.io instead of plain Rotativa to create PDF docs in my app/website?

You should choose Rotativa.io if:

  • You want to avoid problems with hosting the process (running wkhtmltopdf.exe) on your server. Sometimes hosting environments prevent usage of libraries necessary for PDF creation. Or the execution is unstable. Also, this limitations, or lack of, are not always clearly stated in hosting (or cloud service) instructions and are susceptible to change over time. With Rotativa.io you are guarantee PDF creation works now and will in the future.

  • You want to make publishing your application easier and leaner. Reference to Rotativa adds quite a lot to the size of publishing files, instead Rotativa.io is very small. With Rotativa.io there’s no need to install additional graphics libraries. All this results in much faster deploy times.

  • You want to offload the computing for the converting task to a high performance external service.

  • Better handling of PDF headers and footers (can be managed as razor views). See this blog post.

  • You want customer support and updates. We are here to help you and to make the service better, easier, more powerful and up to date with latest technology and frameworks.

  • You get a nice dashboard with live aggregate and detailed data and logs.

  • RotativaH.io is a very stable service. All components are load balanced. We have 3 endpoints distributed on 3 different continents.

  • … and all of this keeping the same Rotativa experience: easy and powerful.