Which PDF document creator: PDFMonkey or DocsAutomator?

[PioneerTown]

Hi there!

For customers, we often need to create PDF documents (often with esigning).
I know there are 2 main integrations for Glide: PDF Monkey and Docsautomator.
(Of course you could integrate with every PDF creator through Zapier but I think it ads another step of complexity to serve the URL back to Glide).

Which should I use and why do you think it’s better?

Thanks!

Nathan

[ThinhDinh]

It depends. Both are good at their own game, I think DocsAutomator requires much less coding knowledge, you can just plug a Google Docs in and it will work, but you must know how to get the right data structure over there.

With PDFMonkey, you should know a bit of HTML and CSS to play around. They also use Liquid so it’s easier for looping to create a table, for example.

[PioneerTown]

Okay, that makes a lot of sense!
So basically, non technical → Docsautomator, otherwise PDF Monkey!

[Rupert]

@PioneerTown Just to add to what @ThinhDinh already said (thank you!):

DocsAutomator…

• preprocesses images, so you can actually throw a lot of different formats etc. at it
• has no cap on document generation times
• has a lot features around styling line items / adding grouping etc.
• allows you to continue editing documents (via Google Docs) after generation
• can handle any design including fonts etc. you can implement in Google Docs

And I’m always there to support

[ThinhDinh]

@PioneerTown

So basically, non technical → Docsautomator, otherwise PDF Monkey!

PDFMonkey also has a “visual” mode where you can drag and drop components into a template, and you can switch it to code mode once you need to do some styling that “visual” doesn’t offer (but it’s a one-way ticket, you can’t reverse that).