TCPDF VS mPDF

Compare TCPDF vs mPDF and see what are their differences.

TCPDF

Official clone of PHP library to generate PDF documents and barcodes (by tecnickcom)
PDF

mPDF

PHP library generating PDF files from UTF-8 encoded HTML (by mpdf)
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TCPDF mPDF
17 18
4,017 4,264
1.7% 1.2%
7.3 7.1
8 days ago 12 days ago
PHP PHP
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v2.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

TCPDF

Posts with mentions or reviews of TCPDF. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-05.
  • Intro to DOMPDF - lightest and simplest PHP library to generate PDF documents
    4 projects | dev.to | 5 Apr 2024
    Generating PDF documents out of your app's HTML output is a very common requirement and there are several open source libraries to accomplish this. I came across this need for my project recently and I evaluated many popular ones such as TCPDF, mpdf, FPDF, etc. But the one that truly stood up to my evaluation in terms of efficiency (minimal footprint) and ease of implementation was DOMPDF.
  • PDF generation in Laravel
    3 projects | dev.to | 24 Dec 2023
    Leveraging Laravel for PDF generation involves utilizing its built-in features or integrating third-party packages. The framework supports popular packages like dompdf and TCPDF, making it easy to implement PDF generation with minimal effort.
  • PostScript’s Sudden Death in Sonoma
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Sep 2023
    TCPDF has full support for rendering an EPS into a PDF.

    It can be fussy.

    https://tcpdf.org/

  • Python to what?
    1 project | /r/ProgrammerHumor | 16 Apr 2023
    Idk what’s the big problem. Maybe it’s just something like https://tcpdf.org ? Using that for years.
  • PHP chart libraries
    4 projects | /r/PHP | 2 Mar 2023
    Depending on if this is a web-based project or not this suggestion might not be suitable. But the last few projects like this I did that were web-based I have used Google Charts with TCPDF. I rendered the charts on the page as a "print preview", and since TCPDF supports basic HTML composition I saved out the charts as generated images and submitted them to the server which generates a PDF. Bit convoluted but that was what I came up with in a hurry.
  • Create this template in .pdf format
    1 project | /r/webdev | 10 Feb 2023
  • pdf generation
    3 projects | /r/PHPhelp | 8 Feb 2023
    Running a headless browser to render HTML is a resource intensive task. If you only need to generate simple documents, you're better off using a tool that generates PDF directly. In the old days we used FPDF and its successors (TCPDF was the most popular). Both seem to have recent releases. There's also mPDF , that seems to be another child of FPDF.
  • Create PDF from Excel.
    1 project | /r/pdf | 27 Jul 2022
    You may want to look at a PDF library (Python/PHP/Perl/Java, etc.) You can do all you mention with a lot of flexibility. tcPDF comes immediately to mind, there is also a Python port. If you want to learn a language, i recommend python. Learning how to make a basic program when it is something that you want, and you know what you want is a great way to learn.
  • Bundling lots of .html files into a PDF?
    3 projects | /r/pdf | 9 Jul 2022
    I would also look at dompdf and tcPDF, they would have very advantages if you intend to revise/reprint your documentation.
  • How to insert MYSQL data in allredy prepared PDF document
    2 projects | /r/PHPhelp | 31 May 2022
    The original site still has it available for download, but most importantly, a ton of examples and documentation, that while I haven't tried the github version, probably works based on the same as the old.

mPDF

Posts with mentions or reviews of mPDF. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-05.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing TCPDF and mPDF you can also consider the following projects:

Dompdf - HTML to PDF converter for PHP

WKHTMLToPDF - Convert HTML to PDF using Webkit (QtWebKit)

tc-lib-pdf - TCPDF - PHP PDF Library - https://tcpdf.org

Snappy - PHP library allowing thumbnail, snapshot or PDF generation from a url or a html page. Wrapper for wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltoimage

PHPWord - A pure PHP library for reading and writing word processing documents

PHPJasper - A PHP report generator

browsershot - Convert HTML to an image, PDF or string

PHPPdf - Pdf and graphic files generator library written in php

FPDI - FPDI is a collection of PHP classes facilitating developers to read pages from existing PDF documents and use them as templates in FPDF.