Puppeteer and Playwright are the main open-source options nowadays, both solid for HTML → PDF once your print CSS is sorted.
Don’t forget proper page breaks (break-before/after/inside) — e.g. break-after: page works in Chromium, while always doesn’t. For trickier pagination you can look at Paged.js, and I’d test layouts in Chrome/Edge before automating.
Shameless plug: I run yakpdf.com, a hosted Puppeteer-based service if you want to avoid self-hosting. https://rapidapi.com/yakpdf-yakpdf/api/yakpdf
- HTML → PDF without any browser engine - PDF compression & optimization - Simple API for manual PDF generation - Text extraction - No native dependencies and cheaper than Aspose
It’s not a full drop-in replacement for every Aspose feature, but it covers the core workflow you mentioned and is much lighter to integrate.
https://rapidapi.com/yakpdf-yakpdf/api/yakpdf (open via firefox)