Comparison
takumi-pdf against Puppeteer and react-pdf, measured.
Three ways to render a PDF from JavaScript, benchmarked on a two-page, 80-line invoice with a page-number footer. Each harness writes the invoice in its engine's native template language with the same geometry (react-pdf's pt values mirror the px used by the other two), so this is an indicative end-to-end comparison, not a pixel-identical one. Warm figures are the median of 20 renders; the bench source reproduces the table with bun bench.
Environment: Apple M1 Pro, macOS 15.7, Bun 1.3.14, Chrome 150.
| takumi-pdf 0.2 | @react-pdf/renderer 4.5.1 | Puppeteer + Chrome | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cold start to first PDF | 203 ms | 386 ms | 1.6–6.8 s |
| Warm render (median) | 30 ms | 127 ms | 218 ms |
| Output size | 11 KB | 5 KB | 102 KB |
| Deploy needs | 1.4 MB gzip wasm | pure JS | Chrome install (hundreds of MB) |
| Template language | JSX, HTML, node trees with CSS and Tailwind | its own primitives (<View>, <Text>, StyleSheet) | HTML with full CSS |
| Selectable text, subset fonts | yes | yes (standard fonts not embedded) | yes |
| Runs on edge runtimes | yes (Cloudflare Workers) | no (Node) | no |
Reading the numbers honestly:
- Chrome's cold start covers launching a browser process; it varies with machine state, and its memory spreads across several processes that a single-process measurement misses. Once warm, Chrome is a capable renderer with the most complete CSS support of the three.
- react-pdf's smaller output comes from the standard 14 PDF fonts, which viewers substitute rather than embed. Its cost is the template: documents are written in its own component set, so existing HTML/JSX and Tailwind markup cannot be reused.
- takumi-pdf reuses OG-image components unchanged, but its CSS coverage is narrower than Chromium's: no
box-shadow,filter,clip-path, or masks in PDF output yet.
Rule of thumb: pixel-perfect reproduction of an existing complex web page favors Puppeteer; documents written from scratch for PDF work in any of the three; reusing Takumi image components, deploying to edge runtimes, or cutting per-document latency favors takumi-pdf.
Last updated on