Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

ScreenshotMAX VS SocketCluster

Compare ScreenshotMAX VS SocketCluster and see what are their differences

ScreenshotMAX logo ScreenshotMAX

The all-in-one Screenshot API for developers: capture websites, generate PDFs, record videos, and automate it all with powerful, scalable infrastructure. No browser setup, no hassle. Just clean results, fast.
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SocketCluster logo SocketCluster

An open, scalable realtime engine for Node.js
  • ScreenshotMAX
    Image date //
    2025-06-11
  • ScreenshotMAX
    Image date //
    2025-06-11
  • ScreenshotMAX
    Image date //
    2025-06-11
  • ScreenshotMAX
    Image date //
    2025-06-11

ScreenshotMAX is a fast, reliable API that lets developers capture website screenshots, generate PDFs from HTML, record animated screencasts, and scrape web data: all with a single, unified interface.

Built by a developer, for developers, ScreenshotMAX eliminates the need to manage headless browsers, deal with flaky rendering, or write complex Puppeteer scripts. It handles the hard parts, so you can focus on your app.

Key Features - Full-page & viewport screenshots: Including lazy-loaded content and dynamic pages. - HTML to PDF rendering: Turn any page or HTML string into a clean, production-ready PDF. - Animated video rendering: Record scrolling or dynamic elements as MP4. - Annoyance blocking: Remove cookie banners, ads, and GDPR popups by default. - Scheduled tasks: Automate recurring jobs: no cron or infrastructure needed. - Fast, scalable & secure: Runs on Google Cloud + Cloudflare, with Redis for rate limiting.

Developer-Friendly - Official SDKs for TypeScript, PHP and Python - Simple authentication via HMAC signatures - Swagger and Postman collections - Built-in caching and webhook support

Use Cases - Automated UI testing - Archiving web pages - Report generation - Scheduled monitoring - PDF export for end users

Whether you're building a dashboard, a CI pipeline, or a SaaS app, ScreenshotMAX helps you deliver clean, reliable visual outputs, without the infrastructure headache.

Start rendering in minutes. No setup. Just results.

  • SocketCluster Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-07

ScreenshotMAX

$ Details
freemium $19.0 / Monthly
Release Date
2024 December
Startup details
Country
France
City
Paris
Employees
1 - 9

ScreenshotMAX features and specs

  • Annoyance Blocking
    Removes cookie banners, ads, and popups for clean captures.
  • Scheduled Screenshot Tasks
    Automate recurring jobs without managing cron or servers.
  • Full-Page Screenshot Rendering
    Captures entire pages including lazy-loaded content and infinite scroll.
  • HTML to PDF Conversion
    Turn any webpage or raw HTML into high-quality PDFs.
  • Animated Screenshots (Video)
    Record scrolling or dynamic elements as MP4/Webm videos

SocketCluster features and specs

  • Scalability
    SocketCluster is designed to be highly scalable, allowing the creation of distributed systems that can handle massive real-time workloads by leveraging multi-core servers and multiple machines.
  • Real-time Performance
    SocketCluster provides low-latency, real-time two-way communication between clients and servers, which is ideal for applications requiring instant data exchange.
  • Flexibility
    It supports a wide range of protocols and languages, which allows developers to create versatile and powerful WebSocket-based applications. It also allows for custom authentication and middleware.
  • Resilience
    Offers automatic reconnections and failover mechanisms, which enhance system reliability and uptime by managing connection interruptions gracefully.
  • Pub/Sub Model
    The built-in publish/subscribe model simplifies message broadcasting to multiple clients and is useful for applications like chat or collaborative tools.
  • Community and Support
    SocketCluster has an active community and good documentation, which helps developers find resources, tutorials, and support through discourse and GitHub.

Possible disadvantages of SocketCluster

  • Complexity
    Setting up and managing a SocketCluster deployment can be complex, especially when dealing with distributed clusters and scaling out, which may require significant effort and expertise.
  • Resource Intensive
    SocketCluster applications can be resource-intensive depending on the scale, requiring careful planning of infrastructure to ensure performance and cost-effectiveness.
  • Maintenance Overhead
    Managing a SocketCluster environment could introduce additional maintenance tasks, such as monitoring and upgrading clusters and handling failover scenarios.
  • Client Support
    Not all environments may support WebSockets natively, which may require polyfills or fallbacks for compatibility, potentially increasing complexity and development time.

ScreenshotMAX videos

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

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SocketCluster videos

013 Client side Logins Authentication with Socketcluster with the client

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to ScreenshotMAX and SocketCluster)
Developer Tools
93 93%
7% 7
APIs
100 100%
0% 0
Mobile Push Messaging
0 0%
100% 100
API Tools
100 100%
0% 0

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing ScreenshotMAX and SocketCluster.

What makes your product unique?

ScreenshotMAX's answer

ScreenshotMAX combines powerful rendering (screenshot, video, PDF) with automation features like scheduled tasks and annoyance blocking. Itโ€™s built for developers who need reliable, clean, and fast results, without managing browsers or infrastructure.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

ScreenshotMAX's answer

Unlike other tools, ScreenshotMAX is built specifically for developers:

  • All-in-one API: Screenshots, PDFs, videos, scraping: no need for multiple services.
  • Clean by default: Blocks cookie banners, ads, and popups automatically.
  • Automation ready: Schedule recurring tasks without cron or extra setup.
  • Fast & scalable: Runs on Google Cloud with built-in CDN via Cloudflare.
  • Easy integration: Official SDKs, Swagger docs, and secure HMAC authentication.

It saves hours of dev time and delivers consistent, production-grade results.

How would you describe your primary audience?

ScreenshotMAX's answer

ScreenshotMAX is designed for developers, technical teams, and SaaS builders who need to:

  • Automate website screenshots, HTML-to-PDF generation, or web scraping.
  • Integrate rendering tasks into CI/CD, monitoring tools, or backends.
  • Save time by avoiding browser setup, Puppeteer maintenance, or infrastructure headaches.

Whether you're a solo indie hacker, a startup dev team, or a platform engineer, ScreenshotMAX helps you move fast with clean, reliable, and scalable APIs.

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

ScreenshotMAX's answer

  • Headless Chrome + Puppeteer: For capturing screenshots, PDFs, and videos with precision.
  • Google Cloud Platform (Cloud Run, Cloud Tasks, Datastore, Cloud Storage): Scalable backend for APIs, storage, job queues, and data.
  • Redis: Real-time rate limiting and usage tracking.
  • Cloudflare + Workers: Global CDN, DNS, and edge logic for speed and reliability.
  • Stripe: Subscription billing and customer portal.
  • Swagger / OpenAPI: For interactive and well-documented developer experience.
  • SDKs (TypeScript, Python, PHP): Easy API integration with typed interfaces and helpers.

What's the story behind your product?

ScreenshotMAX's answer

ScreenshotMAX started as a side project, built out of a real-world need.
As a freelance developer, I had to create a screenshot system for a CI/CD pipeline; automatically testing how hundreds of PDFs were rendered from HTML. Most existing tools were either unreliable, too complex, or didnโ€™t scale.

So, I built my own.

What began as a simple internal tool quickly became something more:
An all-in-one API for screenshots, PDFs, video rendering, and scraping, designed for developers who want powerful results without managing headless browsers or servers.

ScreenshotMAX is my first SaaS product: built for fun, to learn, and to solve a problem I know developers face every day.

User comments

Share your experience with using ScreenshotMAX and SocketCluster. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, SocketCluster seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 11 times since March 2021. 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.

ScreenshotMAX mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of ScreenshotMAX yet. Tracking of ScreenshotMAX recommendations started around Jun 2025.

SocketCluster mentions (11)

  • You might not need WebSockets
    The problem with HTTP2 is that the server-push aspect was tacked on top of an existing protocol as an afterthought. Also, because HTTP is a resource transfer protocol, it adds a whole bunch of overheads like request and response headings which aren't always necessary but add to processing time. The primary purpose of HTTP2 was to allow servers to preemptively push files/resources to clients to avoid round-trip... - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • Exponential Rate Limiting
    For WebSockets, using SocketCluster (https://socketcluster.io), it's possible to queue up all requests from the same client and then detect and respond to high backpressure spikes (e.g. By disconnecting the client and/or recording the incident). You can combine different approaches like limiting the number of connections from a single IP within a certain timeframe and also limiting the backpressure. The ability to... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Ask HN: Why do message queue-based architectures seem less popular now?
    I never fully understood the need for back end message queues TBH. You can just poll the database or data store every few seconds and process tasks in batches... IMO, the 'real time' aspect was only ever useful for front end use cases for performance reasons since short polling every second with HTTP (with all its headers/overheads) is prohibitively expensive. Also, HTTP long polling introduces some architectural... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • The Sound of Software
    Recently, I added an AI-generated soundtrack to my open source project's home page https://socketcluster.io/ It seems unconventional at first but I distinctly remember about a decade ago when Adobe Flash was still broadly supported, many Flash websites had soundtracks. I think the reason why regular HTML websites didn't have them was because it was difficult to implement and internet was much slower so they had to... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Backpressure explained โ€“ the resisted flow of data through software
    I wrote an async/await stream library for JavaScript/Node.js which supports backpressure management. It's heavily tested and used as part of SocketCluster (pub/sub SDK) https://socketcluster.io/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing ScreenshotMAX and SocketCluster, you can also consider the following products

ScreenshotOne - Fast and reliable screenshot API built to handle millions of screenshots a month.

PubNub - PubNub is a real-time messaging system for web and mobile apps that can handle API for all platforms and push messages to any device anywhere in the world in a fraction of a second without having to worry about proxies, firewalls or mobile drop-offs.

ASocks - Clear, Fast & Unlimited. Residential & Mobile Proxies For Best Price.

Socket.io - Realtime application framework (Node.JS server)

Postman - The Collaboration Platform for API Development

SockJS - SockJS is a browser JavaScript library that provides a WebSocket-like object.