Comparison
kove vs DocRaptor
Hosted HTML-to-PDF APIs like DocRaptor and PDFShift take your HTML and CSS and return a PDF. The infrastructure is handled, which is the good part. The document itself is still on you: you write and maintain the HTML and the print CSS, and you debug page breaks, repeating headers and long tables. The API runs the engine, but you still own the hard CSS.
kove is also a hosted API, so the infrastructure is handled either way, but kove handles both sides. You send a JSON document instead of writing print CSS, and pagination and polish come built in. And because kove ships AI-friendly docs (llms.txt, an OpenAPI spec and a simple JSON model), your coding agent can integrate the hosted API into your app for you, so the whole document path gets wired in with almost no effort. A CLI covers local and CI runs.
Side by side
| Feature | kove | DocRaptor |
|---|---|---|
| How you build the document | Send JSON, declarative | Write HTML and print CSS |
| Pagination polish | Handled for you | You write the CSS |
| AI integration | Your agent wires the hosted API into your app | No |
| Infrastructure | Hosted, we run it | Hosted, they run it |
| Local and CI runs | Yes, via the CLI | No, cloud only |
| Cost | Pay-per-use hosted API, free CLI for local and CI | Paid per document, cloud only |
When a hosted HTML-to-PDF API is the better choice
Use DocRaptor, PDFShift or a similar API when you already have polished HTML and print CSS you want to keep, and you just need a reliable cloud engine to render it. If your document is fundamentally an HTML page and the CSS is already solved, a hosted converter is a clean fit.
Send JSON. Get a finished PDF.
A hosted document API. Your coding agent wires it into your app for you, with no infra to run.