I'm building a customer portal that generates certificates as PDFs, what API is simplest?

If you want the simplest API for generating PDF certificates in a customer portal, the best choice usually depends on whether you want easy document generation or full PDF control.

Simplest overall for certificates

DocRaptor or PDFMonkey are often the easiest:

• You send HTML + CSS or a template
• They return a PDF
• Great for certificates, invoices, letters
• Minimal PDF knowledge required

If you want the easiest developer experience

PDFMonkey

• Very straightforward templating
• Good for dynamic certificates
• Easy API and dashboard
• Nice if non-developers may edit templates

If you want more control with familiar web tech

DocRaptor

• Convert HTML/CSS to PDF
• Good rendering quality
• Easy if your certificate is basically a designed webpage

If you want pure code generation

PDFShift

• Simple HTML-to-PDF API
• Lightweight and easy to integrate

Good open-source/self-hosted option

Puppeteer or Playwright

• Render an HTML certificate in a headless browser and print to PDF
• Very flexible
• Not the simplest operationally, but easy if you already have a Node backend

---

My recommendation

For a customer portal where certificates are mostly designed templates:

1. PDFMonkey if you want the easiest template workflow
2. DocRaptor if you want strong HTML/CSS rendering
3. Puppeteer if you want to keep it in your own stack and don’t mind running browser automation

---

Fast rule of thumb

• Need quickest setup → PDFMonkey
• Need best HTML/CSS fidelity → DocRaptor
• Need self-hosted / no third party → Puppeteer

If you want, I can also recommend the best API based on your stack (Node, Python, PHP, etc.) and whether you need templates, signatures, QR codes, or watermarks.