PDFMonkey alternatives

The quick answer

PDFMonkey is a good tool, and for many small teams it is the right one. It has the lowest paid entry price in this group, €5 a month for 300 documents. It also lists connectors for Zapier, Make, n8n, Workato, Bubble and Glide. If it does what you need, staying is a fine choice.

If something does not fit, the right alternative depends on what. The table below gives the short version. The rest of the page explains each option, with one strength and one weakness, and the price at 1,000 documents a month.

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.

PDFShift: One credit is one document per 5 MB of output.

Reasons teams look beyond PDFMonkey

These are situations where PDFMonkey’s published plans may not fit. They come from its own pricing page and docs, not from guesses about its product.

• You want to test with real assets for free. The free plan includes 20 documents a month and cannot load external images, fonts or CSS. A 30-day trial with 300 documents fills that gap for a while.
• You need files to stay available longer. Stored documents are kept 1 day on Starter and 7 days on Pro. Unlimited storage starts with Pro+, at €60 a month.
• The people editing templates do not write code. Templates are HTML and CSS with Liquid, so layout changes need someone comfortable with markup.
• Volume is growing fast. Premium costs €300 a month for 60,000 documents. Past a few tens of thousands a month, it is worth comparing.
• Your documents run many pages. Repeating table headers and page numbers are not described on the pricing page, so check them with your own longest document.

If none of these apply to you, you probably do not need to move. A switch costs a few hours per template, plus testing, and the gain should be worth that time.

How this list is ordered

The options follow the reasons above, from editing without code to print layout. They are not ranked by quality. CastPDF is our product, and it sits third because it answers the third reason, not because we moved it up or down.

We read each vendor’s public pricing page and docs. We did not render test documents in the other tools. Facts come with a source and the date we checked them, listed at the end of the page.

Five alternatives, with one strength and one weakness each

1. APITemplate.io

• Best for: teams split between people who like a visual editor and people who like HTML.
• Price at 1,000 documents: $24 a month on PDF Basic, which includes 3,000.
• Strength: a visual (WYSIWYG) editor and an HTML editor in one product, with Zapier, Make, n8n and Airtable connectors.
• Weakness: no overage price is listed. After the 80% and 100% alerts, you upgrade by hand, and templates are capped at 20 on Basic.

2. CraftMyPDF

• Best for: non-technical designers who want to build documents by dragging elements onto a page.
• Price at 1,000 documents: $29 a month on Lite, which includes 1,200.
• Strength: a drag-and-drop editor, with Zapier, Make and Bubble connectors on every plan.
• Weakness: the Lite plan allows only 6 templates, and unused credits reset each month instead of rolling over.

3. CastPDF

• Best for: developers with Liquid templates whose documents run several pages, or whose volume is climbing.
• Price at 1,000 documents: $19 a month on Starter, which includes 2,500. The Free plan covers 100 a month with external images and fonts allowed.
• Strength: templates are HTML, CSS and Liquid, so a PDFMonkey template moves with little change, and print mode adds repeating table headers, unsplit rows and page numbers.
• Weakness: no visual design tools and no ready-made connectors for automation tools yet. You call it with an HTTP request.

4. PDFShift

• Best for: apps that already build their own HTML and only need it converted, at high volume.
• Price at 1,000 documents: $24 a month on Boost, which includes 2,500 credits. Starter plus extra credits would cost more.
• Strength: plans go up to 250,000 credits a month on a Chromium engine, with the lowest list price here at the top end.
• Weakness: there are no stored templates, so your code builds every document’s HTML. A credit covers one document per 5 MB of output.

5. DocRaptor

• Best for: print-heavy layouts such as books, catalogues or regulated reports, and documents that need accessibility tags.
• Price at 1,000 documents: $75 a month on Premium, which includes 1,250.
• Strength: the Prince engine, a commercial engine made for print layout, plus tagging aimed at WCAG 2.0, Section 508 and PDF/UA.
• Weakness: the highest price per document in this list, and the rates for extra documents are not shown on the signup page.

If you are leaving because of volume

Price at scale is a common reason to compare, so here is that math for PDFMonkey’s largest plan. Premium includes 60,000 documents for €300 a month. On CastPDF, Pro includes 50,000 for $129, and the other 10,000 at $3.50 per 1,000 bring it to $164. Scale includes 200,000 for $299.

Further up, PDFShift’s Shift 100k plan has the lowest list price here: 100,000 credits for $249. It has no templates, though, so you take on building the HTML. CraftMyPDF’s Premium plan includes 40,000 for $299, and DocRaptor quotes custom prices above 40,000.

At the small end PDFMonkey is hard to beat. Up to a few thousand documents a month, its Starter or Pro plan with Boost packs at €5 per 1,000 often costs less than anything else here.

How to choose in an afternoon

1. Name the one thing that is not working. Editing, volume, document length or file storage. Pick the alternative that fixes that, not the one with the longest feature list.
2. Take your longest real document. Not the demo invoice: the 9-page statement or the order with 140 lines. It shows layout problems fast.
3. Run it through two candidates. Use each tool’s free plan or test mode. On CastPDF, test keys are free, unlimited and add a watermark.
4. Price your real volume. Work out next year’s monthly volume, not this month’s, and include extra documents where a vendor sells them.
5. Check who will maintain it. If a developer owns the templates, code-based tools are fine. If not, favour a visual editor.

If you pick CastPDF: what changes in your code

Your templates need little work, since both tools speak Liquid. The Liquid reference lists the extra filters for money and dates. The bigger change is the request your app sends, and how you get the file back.

• One request, one document. POST /v1/pdf returns the PDF in the response body by default. There is nothing to poll.
• A link instead of the file. Add "response": "url" to get JSON with a signed download link that works without a key until it expires.
• Storage by plan. Live documents are stored for 7 days on Starter and up to 90 days on Scale; fetch a fresh link any time before then.
• Safe retries. Send an Idempotency-Key, such as the statement number. A retry returns the first document and is never billed twice.

const statement = { id: 'ST-2026-10-0412', customer: 'Lindqvist Bakery', closing_balance: 1840.25 };

const res = await fetch('https://api.castpdf.com/v1/pdf', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.CASTPDF_API_KEY}`,
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    'Idempotency-Key': `statement-${statement.id}`,
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    template_id: process.env.STATEMENT_TEMPLATE_ID,
    data: statement,
    response: 'url',
  }),
});

if (!res.ok) {
  const { error } = await res.json();
  throw new Error(`${error.code}: ${error.message}`);
}
const doc = await res.json();
console.log(doc.url, doc.pages, doc.expires_at);

The quickstart covers keys and the first request. To see how print mode handles a long table, read the guide to page breaks in HTML to PDF. Plans and overage rates are on the pricing page.

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.