CastPDF vs PDFMonkey

The short answer

Pick PDFMonkey if you make up to a few thousand documents a month, want the lowest entry price, or need a ready-made Zapier, Make or Bubble connector today. It is a mature French product, and its users often praise its support.

Pick CastPDF if your documents run over several pages, if you expect volume to grow, or if you want a bigger free plan to build on. Long tables repeat their header and page numbers work out of the box, 10,000 PDFs cost $49 a month, and a spending cap stops any surprise bill.

Prices side by side

The cheapest monthly plan that includes each volume, from each vendor's public pricing page (checked October 2026, before tax). Where a vendor sells extra documents on a smaller plan, that can cost less than the plan shown; the text below works it out where it matters. CastPDF counts one PDF per document, whatever its page count.

PDFMonkey: prices are in euros, as its pricing page shows them.

Features side by side

We only list what each product publishes. "Not stated" means we did not find it on PDFMonkey’s pricing page or docs, not that the feature is missing.

What 10,000 documents a month really costs

The table above shows the cheapest plan that includes each volume. PDFMonkey also sells extra documents on top of any paid plan, so the honest number at 10,000 is lower than its Premium plan. Its Pro plan costs €15 for 3,000 documents, and pay-as-you-go adds €0.007 each. That makes 10,000 documents about €64 a month.

On CastPDF, the Growth plan includes 10,000 PDFs for $49 a month. At 50,000 documents PDFMonkey’s cheapest route is its Premium plan, €300 for 60,000, and CastPDF’s Pro plan covers 50,000. At a few thousand documents, PDFMonkey’s Pro plan with pay-as-you-go is the cheaper choice, and below 300 its €5 Starter is.

Where CastPDF is stronger

• Long documents. Templates render in print mode, which repeats a table’s header on every page, keeps rows whole and supports page numbers like "Page 2 of 5". See how to repeat table headers.
• A free plan you can build on. 100 live PDFs a month, with images and fonts from the web, and test PDFs that never run out.
• No surprise bills. Paid plans keep going past the limit at a fixed price per 1,000, up to a cap you choose. We email you at 80% and 100% of your PDFs.
• Unused PDFs roll over. A quiet month on a paid plan is not wasted: what you did not use carries over to the next month.
• Safe retries. Send an Idempotency-Key and a retried request returns the first PDF instead of billing a second one.

When PDFMonkey is the better choice

• You need a native Zapier, Make, n8n or Bubble connector this week. CastPDF works from these tools through a plain HTTP step, but it has no app of its own in them yet.
• You make up to a few thousand documents a month and want the lowest possible bill.
• You want stored documents kept with no time limit: PDFMonkey keeps them indefinitely from its Pro+ plan.
• Your team already knows PDFMonkey and your documents are one page long. Moving has a cost, and both tools do the job.

Moving your templates over

Both tools use Liquid, so a move is mostly copy and paste. Plan an hour per template, most of it spent checking the output.

1. Copy the HTML and CSS. Paste your template’s HTML and CSS into a blank CastPDF template in the dashboard.
2. Paste your sample data. Use the JSON you send today as the template’s sample data, so the live preview shows a real document.
3. Check the filters. Standard Liquid tags and filters work as they are. For amounts and dates, CastPDF adds money, number and format_date; the Liquid reference lists them.
4. Remove manual page-break workarounds. If you split tables by hand to fake a repeating header, put the header in a <thead> and let print mode repeat it.
5. Switch the request. Send template_id and data to POST /v1/pdf with a test key. The quickstart shows the full request.

When the output matches, swap the test key for a live key. Compare plans on the pricing page: Starter starts at $19 a month.

Sources

Every fact about another product on this page comes from that product's own pages, checked October 2026. CastPDF's prices and limits come from our pricing page.