Gotenberg is a free, self-hosted Docker API for converting HTML, Markdown, and Office files to PDF. See features, deployment options, and alternatives.
Gotenberg is a stateless, Docker-based HTTP API for converting documents into PDF. It bundles headless Chromium for HTML, URL, and Markdown conversion and LibreOffice for Office-format conversion behind one consistent interface, so teams do not need to install, patch, or scale those tools themselves.
Originally created in 2018 by Julien Neuhart at the French consultancy TheCodingMachine to solve a repeated internal need for PDF generation, Gotenberg has since become an independently maintained open-source project with a large self-hosted user base across SaaS companies and internal tooling teams.
Gotenberg's Chromium routes render HTML pages, remote URLs, and Markdown files exactly as a real browser would, including JavaScript execution and web font loading, with configurable page sizes, margins, headers, footers, and wait conditions for asynchronous content.
Its LibreOffice routes convert Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and dozens of other office formats to PDF, while its PDF-engine routes handle merging, splitting, PDF/A and PDF/UA conversion, watermarking, encryption, metadata editing, and Factur-X e-invoice generation using QPDF, pdfcpu, and ExifTool under the hood.
Because it is stateless and requires no database, Gotenberg scales horizontally with ease, and it exposes Prometheus metrics and health-check endpoints for production monitoring, plus an optional webhook mode for asynchronous processing of long-running jobs.
Gotenberg is completely free and open source under the MIT license. There is no official paid plan, subscription, or per-document fee from the project maintainers — you self-host the Docker container on your own infrastructure and pay only for the compute you use.
A small number of third-party providers offer managed, hosted PDF-generation services either built on or comparable to Gotenberg for teams that would rather not operate the infrastructure themselves, but this is a separate paid layer outside the core open-source project.
Gotenberg is a free, open-source Docker API written in Go that converts HTML, URLs, Markdown, and Office documents into PDF files, and can also merge, split, watermark, and encrypt PDFs.
Yes. Gotenberg is entirely free and open source under the MIT license. You self-host it and only pay for the server or container infrastructure it runs on.
Gotenberg is distributed as a Docker image and is designed to run as a container, so Docker (or a container platform like Kubernetes) is the standard way to deploy it.
Yes. Gotenberg uses LibreOffice internally to convert Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and many other office document formats into PDF.
The core Gotenberg project does not offer its own hosted SaaS. Some third-party providers offer managed hosting built on similar technology, but that is separate from the open-source project.
Gotenberg renders pages using real headless Chromium instead of an older WebKit-based engine, giving much more accurate support for modern CSS, JavaScript, and web fonts.