As we progress through 2025, the Node.js ecosystem continues to offer robust solutions for PDF generation. This article explores the most popular and powerful libraries available today, helping you make an informed decision for your next project. We provide detailed download statistics and simple code examples to give you insights into their real-world usage.
Generating invoice PDFs is a common requirement for web applications — whether for e-commerce, SaaS billing, or financial reporting. Puppeteer, a powerful headless browser automation tool for Node.js, makes it easy to convert HTML into high-quality PDFs. In this guide, we’ll walk you through setting up Puppeteer, designing an invoice with HTML and CSS, and generating a professional PDF.
Generating PDFs has become a crucial feature for many modern web applications, from creating invoices to producing complex data-driven reports. Over the years, various HTML to PDF tools have emerged, each with its own approach and capabilities. In this post, we’ll take a brief look at the evolution of PDF generation solutions — from wkhtmltopdf and PrinceXML (via DocRaptor) to Puppeteer and Playwright — and then walk through a short tutorial on using Playwright (Node.js) to generate a sample PDF in 2025.