A Playwright PDF alternative for .NET.

Playwright and SelectPdf at a glance.

Playwright for .NET is Microsoft's free browser automation library for end-to-end testing; its page.PdfAsync prints a page to PDF with Chromium. SelectPdf.Universal is the cross-platform .NET PDF library from SelectPdf: it converts URLs and HTML to PDF with a Chromium engine shipped in a NuGet package, and also creates, edits and reads PDF documents.

Moving over replaces the browser lifecycle with one converter class and turns PagePdfOptions into converter.Options, with margins in points and timeouts in seconds. The sections below show where SelectPdf comes out ahead, how to migrate Playwright code to SelectPdf, and what it costs.

Where SelectPdf is ahead.

Measurements from the 2026-10-15 run of the open pdf-benchmarks harness: Microsoft.Playwright 1.63.0 and SelectPdf.Universal 26.5.0 on the same machine.

Every number above, with the rest of the measurements, is in the full table below.

Migrate Playwright code to SelectPdf.

The same task in both: an HTML string converted to PDF. Install the library and the engine package for your platform:

dotnet add package SelectPdf.Universal
dotnet add package SelectPdf.Universal.Native.win-x64

Playwright:

using Microsoft.Playwright;

var exitCode = Microsoft.Playwright.Program.Main(["install", "chromium"]);
if (exitCode != 0)
    throw new Exception($"Playwright exited with code {exitCode}");
using var playwright = await Playwright.CreateAsync();
await using var browser = await playwright.Chromium.LaunchAsync();
var page = await browser.NewPageAsync();

await page.SetContentAsync(html);
await page.PdfAsync(new() { Path = "report.pdf" });

SelectPdf:

using SelectPdf.Universal;

HtmlToPdf converter = new HtmlToPdf();
converter.Options.PdfPageSize = PdfPageSize.Letter;
converter.Options.CssMediaType = HtmlToPdfCssMediaType.Print;
converter.Options.WebPageWidth = 816;

PdfDocument doc = converter.ConvertHtmlString(html);
doc.Save("report.pdf");
doc.Close();

The three options reproduce Playwright's defaults (Letter paper, print media, the page laid out at the paper width); without them SelectPdf uses A4, screen media and a 1,024 px layout width. Six tasks side by side, including URLs, page setup, headers and footers and an ASP.NET Core endpoint, each built and checked, are in the migration guide on GitHub.

Map Playwright APIs to SelectPdf.

SelectPdf margins and header heights are in points (20 mm is 57 pt), the layout width in pixels, and timeouts in seconds.

The complete mapping is in the migration guide; every class is in the documentation.

Playwright and SelectPdf pricing.

Playwright is free under the MIT license, with its bundled Node.js driver under Apache-2.0. SelectPdf is commercial: a Single Developer license is USD 499 and a Single Developer OEM license, for SaaS and software sold to customers, USD 799, both perpetual with one year of updates (SelectPdf pricing). The SelectPdf Community Edition converts HTML to PDF for free for documents up to 5 pages, and the full library runs as a 30-day trial without a key. One license covers SelectPdf.Universal and the classic Windows library.

The full measurement.

Microsoft.Playwright 1.63.0 and SelectPdf.Universal 26.5.0 on every axis of the 2026-10-15 run, on one machine under Windows and Linux, generated from the raw data. The method, per-page numbers and eight other .NET PDF libraries are on the results page; the harness is open source, so every number can be re-run.

Linux, Docker and ARM64.

Playwright's Linux browsers need the system packages from install-deps, and its Docker guide uses Microsoft's Playwright image, which holds the browsers and their packages (Chromium, Firefox and WebKit, on .NET 10, about 5 GB on disk); its tag must match the package version. SelectPdf's engine package bundles the Chromium libraries, so the official .NET images work without apt-get lines, as root or as a non-root user; the benchmark image was 270 MB. Linux needs glibc 2.30 or later; on Alpine, conversions run in the SelectPdf engine container.

Step by step: HTML to PDF in Docker on Linux. Both libraries' Dockerfiles are side by side in the C# PDF libraries comparison.