Swydo is a worldwide leader in reporting software for online marketing agencies. Everyday thousands of PDF reports are generated with information from all types of sources like AdWords, Analytics, Facebook and many more. Online marketers all over the world are using Swydo to report their Online Marketing result to their customers or management. And since we are growing quickly, we are creating more and more PDFs every day.
Recently, Swydo switched over to DocRaptor for PDF generation and we haven’t looked back ever since. This article explains the issues we encountered doing it ourselves, why moving to DocRaptor has been a great step for us and how it gives our customers a more stable and flexible product.
When Swydo started generating PDFs, we were looking for a simple solution. It sounds like something half of the world is doing, so there must be some good (open source) software for it, right? Well, back in the day there wasn’t. And even now there are only limited options that will work out of the box.
We found an open source PDF generator and had to use a version from 2009. Newer versions had bugs that made them unusable. From the start we were having all kinds of weird issues. A simple margin change could crash the PDF generation and when it started (randomly) showing blank pages we knew we had to find a better solution.
Enter DocRaptor. We started using DocRaptor in 2014, and the experience has been great. We simply send some HTML and Javascript to them and the PDF is ready in seconds. Whenever we do run into an issue the logs provide a good amount of information, or if all else fails we can contact the team at DocRaptor directly. They helped us solve a couple of Javascript issues so our customers would be up and running again in a very short time. Their excellent support adds great value to their product.
Under the hood DocRaptor uses PrinceXML, a great piece of software for PDF generation. Recently a new version came out (version 10) and it only took a month before it was available in DocRaptor. This allows us to make use of new features without any effort on our side.
If you are generating PDFs on a serious scale like Swydo does, DocRaptor is an option we highly recommend. Even though paid and open source software is improving, it is still worth to consider a pail solution like DocRaptor. Consider the maintenance, hosting and debugging of a custom implementation compared to the fact that the guys from DocRaptor have figured everything out for you. By using their service the Swydo customers have a solid and stable experience when it comes to PDF generation.
Thank you DocRaptor, for the great support and a stable tool we can rely on,
Michiel ter Reehorst
Lead Developer at Swydo