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CodePen VS DocRaptor

Compare CodePen VS DocRaptor and see what are their differences

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CodePen logo CodePen

A front end web development playground.

DocRaptor logo DocRaptor

As the only API powered by the Prince HTML-to-PDF engine, DocRaptor provides the best support for complex PDFs with powerful support for headers, page breaks, page numbers, flexbox, watermarks, accessible PDFs, and much more
Visit Website
  • CodePen Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30
  • DocRaptor Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-06-30

Uniquely Powerful PDF Generation

Only DocRaptor's HTML-to-PDF API has these advanced styling and layout capabilities:

Easy Headers & Footers

Instead of a separate HTML file, DocRaptor headers and footers are part of your document HTML. And easily show (or hide) different headers and footers for different pages.

Mixed Layout, Sizes & Headers

DocRaptor lets you control the style, sizing, headers, and layouts of individual pages in your document. You can even style left and right pages differently, or the first and last pages.

CSS Flexbox

DocRaptor lets you make PDFs with advanced CSS layout tools, including flexbox. You won't need to radically adjust your website to get a great PDF.

Accessible, Tagged PDFs

Create more accessible PDFs by using PDF profiles PDF/A-1a, PDF/A-3a, or PDF/UA-1. Tagged PDFs optimize the reading experience for assistive technology such as screen readers.

Fine-Tune Page Breaks

Our rendering engine was built specifically for making PDFs and we fully support CSS3 Paged Media. This allows much greater control over page breaks, especially when dealing with tables and images.

…and more!

Add crop marks, specify PDF bookmarks, or create standards-compliant documents.

Unmatched Scale & Reliability

We back our API with a 99.999% uptime guarantee. If you need reliability, DocRaptor is the service you can trust. We also have no limits on document input or output size.

CodePen

Website
codepen.io
Pricing URL
-
$ Details
-
Platforms
-
Release Date
-

DocRaptor

$ Details
paid Free Trial $15.0 / Monthly (125+ Documents)
Platforms
REST API PHP Java JavaScript Ruby Drupal Python Node JS Laravel Cross Platform .Net Generic HTTP API Cloud
Release Date
2010 May

CodePen features and specs

  • Real-time Collaboration
    Developers can collaborate with others in real-time, making it easy to work on projects with teammates or seek help from the community.
  • Immediate Visual Feedback
    CodePen allows you to see the results of your code as you write it, which is highly beneficial for learning and debugging.
  • Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
    CodePen provides a comfortable and feature-rich online IDE environment with syntax highlighting, autocomplete, and more.
  • Community-Driven
    Users can share their work with the CodePen community, receive feedback, and explore a wide range of projects created by others.
  • Extensive Resources
    CodePen offers a wealth of examples and templates for various web development tasks, making it a useful resource for learning and inspiration.
  • Cross-Device Accessibility
    Being an online platform, CodePen can be accessed from any device with an internet connection, making it convenient for developers on the move.

Possible disadvantages of CodePen

  • Limited Offline Functionality
    Since CodePen is primarily an online tool, it requires an internet connection for most of its features to work, limiting its usefulness in offline environments.
  • Performance Constraints
    Complex or resource-intensive projects may not perform as well on CodePen as they would in a full-fledged local development environment.
  • Subscription Costs
    While many features are free, advanced functionalities and additional storage options require a paid subscription, which may not be ideal for all users.
  • Limited Backend Capabilities
    CodePen is primarily designed for front-end development, so it offers limited support for backend technologies, making it less suitable for full-stack or server-side development.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing dependencies and libraries can be cumbersome compared to local development environments which have better tools for this purpose, like npm.
  • Security Concerns
    Sharing projects with the public can expose your code and assets to unauthorized use, posing potential intellectual property and security risks.

DocRaptor features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    DocRaptor provides an easy-to-use API that allows for quick integration with various programming languages such as Ruby, Python, PHP, and Node.js.
  • Customizable
    The tool offers extensive customization options for PDFs and Excel documents, allowing users to control styles, formatting, and layout using CSS and JavaScript.
  • High-Quality Rendering
    DocRaptor uses the Prince XML engine, known for its high-quality rendering of complex layouts and support for modern HTML and CSS standards.
  • Compliance
    DocRaptor is officially compliant with various privacy regulations, including GDPR, HIPAA, and others, ensuring that data is handled securely.
  • Customer Support
    Users generally report high satisfaction with DocRaptor's customer support, noting quick response times and helpful guidance.

Analysis of CodePen

Overall verdict

  • Yes, CodePen is considered a good platform for web developers, both beginners and experienced. It offers a wide array of features that facilitate creative development and community engagement.

Why this product is good

  • CodePen is a popular online code editor and community platform for front-end developers to experiment with creating and sharing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript snippets. It provides an easy-to-use interface and real-time previews, making it a valuable tool for learning, prototyping, and sharing web development work. It also fosters a community where developers can showcase their projects, receive feedback, and learn from each other.

Recommended for

  • Front-end developers who want to quickly prototype and test web designs.
  • Beginners in web development looking to learn and receive feedback from the community.
  • Educators and students interested in a platform to showcase projects and collaborate.
  • Developers who want to explore creative coding and share their work with a community.

Analysis of DocRaptor

Overall verdict

  • DocRaptor is generally considered a good choice for those needing robust and reliable document generation services, especially in cases where precise formatting and custom styling are important.

Why this product is good

  • DocRaptor is widely regarded as a good service because it provides high-quality PDF and Excel document generation. It offers ease of integration with various programming languages via an API, allowing developers to convert HTML content into well-formatted documents. The service is known for its reliability, excellent customer support, and the ability to handle complex document structures, which can be a critical factor for businesses requiring precise formatting and consistency.

Recommended for

  • Businesses needing automated document generation for invoices, reports, or billing statements.
  • Developers looking for easy API integration for document conversion in their applications.
  • Organizations that require high-quality PDFs with complex layouts and styling.
  • Teams that prioritize customer support and detailed documentation.

CodePen videos

What Is Codepen?

More videos:

  • Review - Learn to use CodePen from a co-founder of CodePen
  • Review - Using CodePen For Inspiration & Learning

DocRaptor videos

No DocRaptor videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to CodePen and DocRaptor)
Text Editors
100 100%
0% 0
PDF Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Programming
100 100%
0% 0
Office & Productivity
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using CodePen and DocRaptor. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare CodePen and DocRaptor

CodePen Reviews

Best Forums for Developers to Join in 2025
Codepen is a social network for developers to show off their work, ask and answer questions, and exchange ideas. It's like a Reddit for coding and design, with a large community of talented web developers.
Source: www.notchup.com
Top 10 Developer Communities You Should Explore
Codepen is a social development environment that allows developers to showcase their work and experiment with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a collaborative space. Codepen’s focus on visual and interactive development makes it an excellent community for front-end developers and designers.
Source: www.qodo.ai
8 Best Replit Alternatives & Competitors in 2022 (Free & Paid) - Software Discover
Codepen is a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. Build and deploy a website, show off your work, build test cases to learn.
Best Online Code Editors For Web Developers
Probably the most popular online code editor. CodePen is fast, easy to use, and allows a web developer to write and share HTML/CSS/JS code online.
Source: techarge.in
Top 25 websites for coding challenge and competition [Updated for 2021]
CodePen is a cool online IDE that allows you to write code in your browser and see the result just as you build it. CodePen challenges is a place for leveling up your skills by building things. Each week, new challenges appear for you to tackle, and the best “Pens” get picked.

DocRaptor Reviews

  1. Cool app

    I've been using it for a while. It's great to create contracts.

    🏁 Competitors: pdfmatrix.com
  2. Megan Mahdavi
    · Principal Consultant at Sunreach ·
    Great app - resolves the limitations of other doc/merge apps

    We wanted an app that would allow for custom branding and layout, the font of our choice, and merge fields across our main SF objects. Previously we used DocGen, which led to a morass of configuration to put fields in exactly the place they needed to be for the tables, as well as a bunch of SOQL queries to manage conditional logic. The VF doc generator can't accommodate the fonts we use in our branding. And so DocRaptor has been the perfect solution.

    Our developer built the contracts, and we went live within weeks with complete branding, flexibility in the data merges (we were able to remove a ton of bad config) and it's easy to manage.

    👍 Pros:    Flexible|Great customer support|Super fast
  3. Amaury Bouchard
    · Founder at Rolis ·
    The best HTML to PDF solution

    I have been using DocRaptor for 6 years, both for my professionnal and personnal projects. After trying several free and/or open source HTML to PDF solutions, I was happy to find this service. It's the most efficient solution, which generates the most accurate PDF documents.

    Since it's a SaaS service, there is nothing to install, no library dependencies nor experimental software that you're not sure it will be supported in the future.

    There is a lot of options and CSS rules to dig in if you want to get PDF files that exactly matches what you want. But the other solutions I tried didn't have these options, and the result was not good enough.

    👍 Pros:    Simple api|No dependencies|Best pdf result|A lot of options to help you create the pdf you need|Good customer support
    👎 Cons:    A lot of css rules to learn if you want to get the perfect pdf of your dreams... but at least these rules exist!

14 Best PDF APIs for Every Business Need
DocRaptor is an HTML-to-PDF API that empowers you with unmatched scalability and reliability. Even if you need thousands of PDF documents every day, it can handle your requirements. It also guarantees 99.999% uptime and has no restrictions on the input and output size of the files.
Source: geekflare.com
Best BFO Java PDF Library Alternatives (2024) for your project
DocRaptor is a service that is hosted in the cloud and generates PDF documents from HTML and CSS in a seamless manner. Because it enables developers to easily convert web information into PDFs of excellent quality, it is a convenient solution for projects in which HTML-to-PDF conversion is a primary requirement.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, CodePen seems to be a lot more popular than DocRaptor. While we know about 503 links to CodePen, we've tracked only 4 mentions of DocRaptor. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

CodePen mentions (503)

View more

DocRaptor mentions (4)

  • Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs
    It sounds like this is as advanced as DocRaptor[1]. They have what I consider to be the best PDF generation API, giving complete control over the documents you need to create. The pricing is similar. If you'd rather do it for free weasyprint[2] is the best open source alternative. Another more affordable option you might want to consider is Urlbox[3]. (Disclosure: I work on this) Urlbox's rendering engine is based... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • How do you generate PDF reports from HTML?
    We built the DocRaptor API to let developers have affordable access to the commercial Prince PDF engine. We have Node code examples throughout the documentation. Source: over 2 years ago
  • What is the best online HTML to PDF converter?
    I'd argue our service, DocRaptor, is the best because it's the only one powered by the Prince PDF engine. Unlike open-source, browser-based conversion engines, Prince was custom-built just for converting HTML into PDFs and offers a lot of unique functionality for making more complex PDFs. Source: about 3 years ago
  • Is it possible to render a RazorPage (inc. CSS) to a PDF file and download via WebAPI?
    I work for https://docraptor.com, which is an HTML to PDF API. We have a C# agent. Source: almost 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing CodePen and DocRaptor, you can also consider the following products

JSFiddle - Test your JavaScript, CSS, HTML or CoffeeScript online with JSFiddle code editor.

PDFCrowd - Pdfcrowd is a Web/HTML to PDF online service. Convert HTML to PDF online in the browser or in your PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, Java apps via the REST API.

CodeSandbox - Online playground for React

PDFShift - Convert any HTML documents to high-fidelity PDF using a single POST request

GitHub - Originally founded as a project to simplify sharing code, GitHub has grown into an application used by over a million people to store over two million code repositories, making GitHub the largest code host in the world.

pdflayer - Free, powerful HTML to PDF API supporting both URL and raw HTML conversion. Unlimited document size, lightning-fast and compatible PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.