Bannerbear vs Galley Render

The short version

1. Pick Bannerbear if a non-developer needs to lay a template out visually, if you want animation or video, or if you want the work to reach you through one of its 50+ app integrations rather than through code.
2. Pick Galley Render if an agent or a backend is the one calling the API, you want a JSON Schema contract per template version, and you care about the per-render price.
3. These two products are only partly the same thing, and the part where they overlap is the part where Galley competes on price.

At a glance

Item	Bannerbear	Galley Render
Free tier	None. A 30-credit trial, non-renewable, no card	200 renders a month, plus a keyless 50-render trial
Entry paid	Automate $49/mo — 1,000 API credits	Starter $19/mo — 5,000 renders
Effective unit	$0.049 / $0.0149 / $0.00598 per credit	$0.0038 / $0.00263 / $0.00166 per render
Overage	None. Upgrade, or wait for the 1st of the month	$4 per 1,000 renders on every paid plan
Usage-based	Not offered	$0.006 per PNG or JPG, $0.015 per PDF page

Effective unit prices are plain arithmetic on the published plan price and included credits, not a claim either vendor makes. And the units are not the same: read “The units are not the same” below before comparing them.

Render one now, no key Read the quickstart

Pick Bannerbear if a non-developer needs to lay a template out visually, if you want animations or video, or if you want the work to reach you through one of its 50+ app integrations rather than through code. Pick Galley Render if an agent or a backend is the one calling the API, you want a JSON Schema contract per template, and you care about the per-render price: Bannerbear’s cheapest published credit is $0.049 and its cheapest is $0.00598, against $0.0038 to $0.00166 on Galley’s paid tiers. The honest one-line version is that these two products are only partly the same thing, and the part where they overlap is the part where Galley competes on price.

What each one is

Bannerbear generates images, animations and video from templates you build in its editor, and exposes them over a REST API, an MCP server, Forms, Workflows and 50+ app integrations. It meters everything in a single “API credit” unit, with a separate monthly pool of “AI credits.”

Galley Render takes a template name plus a JSON payload and returns a signed URL to a PDF, PNG or JPG. Templates are HTML with a Liquid subset and a JSON Schema per version; versions are immutable and content-addressed; identical inputs hit a deterministic cache and cache hits are never billed. There is no visual designer, no animation or video output, and no app-integration catalogue.

Pricing

	Bannerbear	Galley Render
Free tier	None. A free trial of 30 API credits, non-renewable, no card required	$0/mo: 200 renders, 3 templates, no watermark. Plus a keyless 50-render MCP trial
Entry paid	Automate $49/mo — 1,000 API credits, 200 AI credits	Starter $19/mo — 5,000 renders, 25 templates, webhooks, 30-day retention
Mid	Scale $149/mo — 10,000 API credits, 600 AI credits (selector also offers 20k/30k/40k steps)	Growth $79/mo — 30,000 renders, unlimited templates, cloud push, 90-day retention, priority queue
Top published	Enterprise $299/mo — 50,000 API credits, 1,250 AI credits (selector also offers 100k/500k/1M/2M)	Scale $249/mo — 150,000 renders, dedicated pool, SLA
Effective unit	$0.049 / $0.0149 / $0.00598 per credit	$0.0038 / $0.00263 / $0.00166 per render
Overage	None. Upgrade, or wait for the 1st of the month	$4 per 1,000 renders on every paid plan
Rollover	“Unused API credits are not carried over the following month”	Not applicable within a month; annual billing is two months free
Usage-based	Not offered	$0.006 per PNG/JPG, $0.015 per PDF page, default $50/mo spend cap

The effective unit prices above are plain arithmetic on the published plan price and included credits, not a claim either vendor makes.

The units are not the same

This is where most side-by-side comparisons go wrong.

Bannerbear’s rule, verbatim from its V5 FAQ: “One image render is one credit; heavier work costs more.” An image costs “One, multiplied by the number of formats you ask for and by the scale. A jpg at scale 1 is one credit; jpg and png at scale 2 is four.” AI features are “one credit each, per layer.” Animation is “Two per second of output, rounded up… minimum of one.” Tools cost “Between one and four,” with trimming a video, adding cover art and building a PDF each costing one.

Galley’s rule: 1 unit per PNG or JPG, 1 unit per PDF page. scale is a render option, not a multiplier — the same PNG at scale 4 is still one unit. Asking for two formats means two renders, so two units. Cache hits are never billed.

So Bannerbear is more expensive per unit and charges more units for the same multi-format job; Galley is cheaper per unit but charges per page on PDFs, which makes it a poor fit for long documents. If your work is page-heavy, read the Carbone comparison instead — Galley loses that one.

Caution

Bannerbear’s current V5 FAQ prices a PDF built through POST /v5/tools/create_pdf at one credit, and lists pdf among the accepted formats. A separate page at /pricing/api-calculator/, explicitly labelled “These docs are for an older version of Bannerbear (V3),” still says PDF costs 3 credits. This page uses the current V5 figure. If PDF volume matters to your budget, confirm it with Bannerbear before committing.

Worked scenarios

Arithmetic shown so you can substitute your own numbers.

1. 1,000 single-format PNGs a month. Bannerbear: 1,000 credits, which is exactly the Automate allowance. $49/mo. Galley: pay as you go, 1,000 × $0.006 = $6.00/mo (Starter at $19 costs more at this volume, so PAYG wins).

2. 5,000 single-format PNGs a month. Bannerbear: 5,000 credits. Automate covers 1,000 and there is no way to buy more, so the cheapest plan that fits is Scale. $149/mo, of which you use half. Galley: Starter includes 5,000. $19/mo. (PAYG would be 5,000 × $0.006 = $30, so Starter wins.)

3. 3,000 designs, each exported as jpg and png at scale 2. Bannerbear: by its own example, jpg and png at scale 2 is four credits, so 3,000 × 4 = 12,000 credits. Scale includes 10,000, which is short. The 20,000-credit step on Scale exists in the plan selector but its price is computed in JavaScript and is not in the served HTML, so the cheapest price we can actually cite is Enterprise at $299/mo. Galley: two formats is two renders; scale does not multiply. 3,000 × 2 = 6,000 renders. Starter covers 5,000, and 1,000 overage at $4/1,000 = $4. $19 + $4 = $23/mo.

4. 30,000 single-format renders a month. Bannerbear: Scale’s selector lists a 30,000 step, price again unverified. The cheapest published price covering 30,000 credits is Enterprise, $299/mo. Galley: Growth includes 30,000. $79/mo.

5. The month you go over. Bannerbear: “There is no option to buy additional credits.” Your choices are “Upgrade to a plan with a higher API credit limit” or “Wait for the monthly reset which happens on the 1st of every month,” and until then “API / integrations will stop working.” Note also that “Renders are charged when they are created, so a failure after that point has already been counted.” Galley: overage bills at $4 per 1,000 renders, under a spend cap that defaults to $50/mo and that you set. Nothing stops until the cap is hit, and the cap is yours to raise. See spend caps.

Feature comparison

Only rows we could source. A blank or hedged cell means we did not find it, not that it does not exist.

	Bannerbear	Galley Render
Visual template editor, Forms, Workflows	Yes, listed on every plan	No
App integrations	50+, listed on every plan	No catalogue; webhooks on Starter and up
Animation and video output	Yes — animation credits, plus tools for trimming video and adding cover art	No
PDF output	Yes: pdf in formats, plus POST /v5/tools/create_pdf, which “Stitches multiple JPGs, PNGs and PDFs into a single multi-page document,” 1 credit	Yes, billed per page
Raster output	jpg, png, webp, avif	png, jpg. webp is not supported
MCP server	Yes, on every plan including Automate	Yes, at https://mcp.galleyrender.com/mcp
Published rate limit	“60 POST requests per 10 second window”	Not published on the pages in this comparison; see the render reference
Sync vs async	Async by default (202 plus webhook or polling); a sync endpoint at https://sync.api.bannerbear.com with a 10-second timeout	Small jobs return inline; webhook_url, async: true or a large payload queues
SSO, audit logs, zero data retention	Enterprise	Not offered
Instant URLs, custom S3, team members, 2FA	Scale and Enterprise (feature names as listed on the pricing page; we did not read their reference docs)	Cloud push on Growth and up
JSON Schema contract per template	Not found on the pricing page, the V5 developer docs index, or the two help-centre articles we read	Yes, per immutable version, with a free validate_data dry run
Deterministic render cache, unbilled on a hit	Not found on the pages above	Yes — SHA-256 of template checksum, canonical data, canonical options and format
Expiring signed output URLs	Not found on the pages above	Yes, default one hour, refreshable via get_render

Note

MCP is not a differentiator. Bannerbear ships an MCP server on every plan, including the $49 Automate tier. So do Carbone and Cloudflare. If a vendor tells you MCP support is the reason to switch, they are selling you table stakes. The narrower claims Galley can actually make are the last three rows: a JSON Schema contract per template version, a deterministic cache that is never billed on a hit, and expiring signed output URLs. We looked for all three in Bannerbear’s pricing page, its V5 developer documentation index, and its help-centre articles on quotas, and did not find them documented. That is where we looked; it is not proof they are absent.

Where Bannerbear is the better choice

1. Somebody who is not an engineer has to build the template. Bannerbear’s editor, Forms and Workflows exist so a marketer can ship a template without opening a repo. Galley templates are HTML plus Liquid, committed and versioned like code. There is no WYSIWYG designer on the Galley roadmap that we can point you at today.
2. You need animation or video. Bannerbear prices animation explicitly (“Two per second of output, rounded up”) and ships video tools. Galley outputs PDF, PNG and JPG. That is the whole list.
3. You want the tool wired into apps, not into code. 50+ integrations on every plan is a genuinely different distribution story from a REST endpoint and an MCP server.
4. You need enterprise controls now. SSO, audit logs and zero data retention are published Enterprise features. Galley does not offer them.
5. Alternate raster formats. webp and avif are supported output formats on Bannerbear and are not supported on Galley.

Where Galley is the better choice

1. Per-render price, once volume is real. $0.0038 at Starter against $0.049 at Automate is roughly 13x. The gap narrows at the top — $0.00166 against $0.00598 is about 3.6x — but it does not close.
2. Running out does not break production. Bannerbear has no overage at all; Galley meters past the included allowance at $4 per 1,000 under a cap you control.
3. Repeat work is free. If your workload re-renders the same invoice or the same card, Galley’s cache key means the second identical request costs nothing. Bannerbear charges at creation, including for renders that later fail.
4. Multi-format and high-scale output does not multiply your bill. Two formats is two renders on Galley, versus four credits for jpg-plus-png at scale 2 on Bannerbear.
5. An agent can start with no signup. 50 renders over MCP with no key, then a real free tier of 200 renders a month. Bannerbear’s trial is a fixed, non-renewable 30 credits capped at one workspace and three templates.

Caution

Things we could not verify on Bannerbear’s pages and therefore do not assert in either direction: whether annual billing or an annual discount exists (it is not mentioned on the pricing page), the prices of the higher credit steps, template-count limits on paid plans, team-member counts, retention windows other than Enterprise “Zero Data Retention”, and bandwidth overage rates.

Nothing above needs an account, a card or a key. The demo renders on the production service.

Render one now, no key Read the quickstart

Migrating

The shape of the move is the same either way: a template identifier plus per-field values becomes a template identifier plus a data object that is checked against the template’s JSON Schema before anything renders.

Start by reading the schema, so you know what the payload has to contain:

curl -sS https://api.galleyrender.com/v1/templates/invoice \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GALLEY_API_KEY"

Then render. Small jobs finish inside the call:

curl -sS https://api.galleyrender.com/v1/render \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GALLEY_API_KEY" \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{
        "template": "social-card@2",
        "format": "png",
        "data": {
          "headline": "Quarterly results are in",
          "author": "Acme Research"
        },
        "options": { "width": 1200, "height": 630, "scale": 2 }
      }'

{
  "object": "render",
  "id": "rnd_7hq2m4x8k1bv",
  "status": "succeeded",
  "format": "png",
  "cached": false,
  "url": "https://<account>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com/galley-renders/renders/…?X-Amz-Expires=3600&X-Amz-Signature=…",
  "billable_units": 1
}

Three habits worth carrying over from day one: pin the version (social-card@2, not social-card), call validate_data in tests rather than burning renders on bad payloads, and re-send the identical request instead of caching files yourself — a cache hit is free and instant. The quickstart has the MCP path, and the template gallery has the 22 starter templates that are loaded into every account.

Where the competitor’s numbers came from

Note

Every competitor figure on this page was read from Bannerbear’s own pages on 2026-09-16 and is listed under Sources. Where a number was not on the page, this page says so rather than guessing.

Sources

All accessed 2026-09-16.

• Bannerbear pricing and plan features — https://www.bannerbear.com/pricing/
• Bannerbear V5 developer documentation — https://developers.bannerbear.com/v5/
• “What if I used up my monthly quota?” (overage, rollover, credit rules) — https://www.bannerbear.com/help/articles/223-what-if-i-used-up-my-monthly-quota/
• “What is the maximum quota limit?” — https://www.bannerbear.com/help/articles/224-what-is-the-maximum-quota-limit/
• V3-labelled API calculator, cited only for the PDF credit discrepancy — https://www.bannerbear.com/pricing/api-calculator/
• Galley Render pricing — /pricing

Prices and limits change, and vendors are entitled to change them without telling us. Check https://www.bannerbear.com/pricing/ and our pricing page before you make a decision on these numbers.