PDFMonkey vs Galley Render

The short version

1. PDFMonkey is the closest match on this page: HTML plus Liquid templates, a JSON payload, an official MCP server, and a small team that says so plainly on its own pricing page.
2. It bills per document with no page-count penalty, the opposite of Galley's per-PDF-page meter, so a long document is usually cheaper on PDFMonkey and a short one is usually cheaper on Galley.
3. Pick Galley if you want a published JSON Schema per template and a render that's free on a cache hit; pick PDFMonkey if your documents run long, or its visual dashboard editor is what your team needs.

At a glance

Item	PDFMonkey	Galley Render
Free tier	€0 — 20 documents a month, plus a separate one-time 300-document, 30-day offer with no card	5 PDF pages or 5 images a month, plus a keyless trial of 10 PDF pages or 10 images
Entry paid	Starter €5/mo (€4.50/mo annual) — 300 documents	Solo $5/mo — 200 PDF pages or 500 images
The unit	One document, any page count	One PNG or JPG, or one PDF page
Overage	€0.008 down to €0.005 per extra document, by plan. A 1,000-document boost pack is €5	1¢ a page and 0.4¢ an image on Starter, Growth and Scale, and 1.5¢ a page and 0.6¢ an image on Solo
Template language	HTML + Liquid, the same templating family Galley uses	HTML + a Liquid subset

PDFMonkey's prices are EUR and Galley's are USD. This page doesn't convert between them — compare the shapes, then apply your own rate.

Render one now, no key Read the quickstart

PDFMonkey is the closest relative Galley has among the pages in this section. Both take HTML with Liquid expressions and a JSON payload and give back a PDF; both ship an MCP server; both hand back a signed URL that expires in an hour. The differences that matter are the billing unit — PDFMonkey per document, Galley per PDF page — and what each publishes about the contract a caller can rely on before it renders.

What each one is

PDFMonkey is a document-generation service: design a template in its dashboard editor (or write the HTML and Liquid directly), send a JSON payload to its REST API, get back a PDF or an image. It supports synchronous and asynchronous generation, webhooks, and Zapier, Make and n8n integrations, and it publishes an official MCP server (github.com/pdfmonkey/pdfmonkey-mcp) with eleven tools covering templates, documents, snippets and account status.

Galley Render takes a template name and 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.

Pricing

Caution

PDFMonkey’s prices are EUR. Galley’s are USD. This page doesn’t convert between them, because we don’t have a sourced exchange rate to cite. Compare the shapes, then apply your own rate.

PDFMonkey

Plan	Monthly	Annual (per mo)	Documents/mo	Retention	Overage
Free	€0	—	20	1 day	Not available
30-day trial	€0, no card	—	300 (one-time)	1 day	—
Starter	€5	€4.50	300	1 day	€0.008/doc
Pro	€15	€13.50	3,000	7 days	€0.007/doc
Pro+	€60	€54	5,000	Unlimited	€0.006/doc
Premium	€300	€270	60,000	Unlimited	€0.005/doc

A 1,000-document “boost pack” is €5 (€0.005/doc) on any paid plan as an alternative to metered overage. Yearly billing is roughly 10% off monthly.

Galley Render

Plan	Price	Includes
Free	$0	5 PDF pages or 5 images a month, 3 templates, no watermark. Plus a keyless MCP trial of 10 PDF pages or 10 images
Solo	$5/mo	200 PDF pages or 500 images a month, 10 templates, webhooks, cloud delivery, 30-day retention. Spend cap of $50/mo by default
Starter	$19/mo	2,000 PDF pages or 5,000 images a month, 25 templates, webhooks, cloud delivery, 30-day retention
Growth	$79/mo	12,000 PDF pages or 30,000 images a month, unlimited templates, cloud push, 90-day retention, priority queue
Scale	$249/mo	60,000 PDF pages or 150,000 images a month, dedicated pool, SLA

Overage is 1.5¢ a page and 0.6¢ an image on Solo, and 1¢ a page and 0.4¢ an image on Starter, Growth and Scale.

The units

PDFMonkey, from its own API reference: "output_type": "pdf" or "image", inherited from the template", billed as one document per render, whatever the page count. Galley bills one PDF page, or one PNG/JPG. So a 20-page PDFMonkey report costs the same as a one-pager; the same 20-page document on Galley is 20 billable pages.

Worked scenarios

1. 250 one-page invoices a month. PDFMonkey: 250 documents. Starter covers 300. €5/mo. Galley: 250 pages. Solo covers 200 PDF pages, plus 50 more at 1.5¢ = $0.75. $5 + $0.75 = $5.75/mo, in USD against PDFMonkey’s EUR price — close either way at this volume.

2. 3,000 fifteen-page reports a month. PDFMonkey: 3,000 documents, page count irrelevant. Pro covers exactly 3,000. €15/mo. Galley: 3,000 × 15 = 45,000 pages. Scale includes 60,000 PDF pages. $249/mo. PDFMonkey wins by a wide margin — this is the per-document unit doing exactly what it’s built for.

3. 500 single-page social cards (PNG) a month. PDFMonkey: 500 documents (images count the same as PDFs in its model). Starter covers 300, plus 200 more at €0.008 = €1.60. €5 + €1.60 = €6.60/mo. Galley: 500 images. Solo covers 500 images exactly. $5/mo. Close, and Galley’s image pricing is slightly ahead at this volume because images and PDF pages meter separately rather than sharing one per-document count.

4. The free tiers. PDFMonkey: 20 documents a month forever, or (separately) a one-time 300-document, 30-day introductory offer with external resources (images, fonts) included — Free excludes them. Galley: 5 PDF pages or 5 images a month, plus a lifetime keyless trial of 10 PDF pages or 10 images, external assets included from the first render. PDFMonkey’s ongoing free tier is four times larger by document count; its one-time introductory offer is larger still but doesn’t renew.

Feature comparison

Only rows we could source from PDFMonkey’s own pricing and documentation pages, checked 2026-09-24. A blank or hedged cell means we didn’t find it there, not that it doesn’t exist.

	PDFMonkey	Galley Render
Template language	HTML + Liquid, dashboard editor or code	HTML + a Liquid subset
Billing unit	One document, any page count	One PDF page, or one PNG/JPG
Output formats	PDF and image (output_type); specific image formats not stated on the pages we read	PDF, PNG, JPG
Sync vs async	Both: POST /documents/sync (6-minute timeout) and async with polling	Small jobs return inline; larger ones or async: true queue
Webhooks	Yes	Yes, Solo and up
Signed output URLs	Yes, S3, “valid for 1 hour”	Yes, default one hour, refreshable
MCP server	Yes, official, 11 tools (pdfmonkey/pdfmonkey-mcp on GitHub)	Yes, at https://mcp.galleyrender.com/mcp
JSON Schema contract per template	Not found — templates carry “sample data,” not a schema, on the pages we read	Yes, per version, with a free validate_data dry run
Deterministic render cache, unbilled on a hit	Not found on the pages we read	Yes — SHA-256 of template checksum, canonical data, canonical options and format
Template versioning	Templates hold a published body and a draft body; no version history published on the pages we read	Immutable, content-addressed versions, name@version
Rate limits	Not found on the pages we read	Not published on the pages in this comparison; see the render reference
Compliance certification	“PDFMonkey has no special compliance certification as we’re a very small company and certifications are extremely expensive”	Not offered

Note

MCP isn’t a differentiator here — PDFMonkey ships one too, and it’s official. The narrower claims that hold up against PDFMonkey’s own pages are a JSON Schema contract per template version and a deterministic cache that’s free on a hit. We looked for both on PDFMonkey’s pricing page, its documentation home, its Documents and Templates API reference, and its “Using Dynamic Data” guide, and found “sample data” but no schema and no mention of caching or deduplication. That’s where we looked, and it isn’t proof either is absent elsewhere in PDFMonkey’s docs.

Where PDFMonkey is the better choice

1. Long documents, or documents of unpredictable length. Its per-document unit doesn’t care whether a report is 1 page or 40 — scenario 2 above is the plain case for it.
2. A non-developer needs to build the template. PDFMonkey’s dashboard editor with a live preview is built for that; Galley’s templates are HTML committed like code.
3. You want the MCP server’s snippet tools. list_snippets/get_snippet exposes reusable Liquid fragments across templates from the agent side — Galley has no equivalent.
4. You value a plainly-stated limit on what they’ll claim. “We have no special compliance certification… certifications are extremely expensive” is the kind of sentence worth trusting a vendor for.

Where Galley is the better choice

1. Short documents and images at real volume. Scenarios 1 and 3 land close or ahead for Galley, and the gap widens as image share grows, because PDFMonkey counts an image the same as a whole document.
2. A schema an agent can read before it renders. get_template returns the JSON Schema and validate_data dry-runs a payload for free; PDFMonkey’s templates carry sample data but not a schema on the pages we read.
3. A render cache that’s free on a hit. Re-running the same document twice costs nothing on Galley; we found no equivalent claim for PDFMonkey.
4. USD, and a spend cap on overage rather than a currency conversion and a boost-pack decision.

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

Both use Liquid, so most of a PDFMonkey template’s markup and expressions carry over unchanged — the differences are in delivery, not syntax. Two things to check as you move a template: PDFMonkey’s Liquid snippets (shared partials) don’t exist on Galley, so inline anything a template includes; and a schema is optional on PDFMonkey and required on Galley, so write one while the fields are fresh in your head.

curl -sS https://api.galleyrender.com/v1/templates \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GALLEY_API_KEY" \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{
        "name": "invoice",
        "engine": "chromium",
        "source": "<html><body><h1>Invoice {{ invoice_number }}</h1><p>{{ customer.name }}</p></body></html>",
        "schema": {
          "type": "object",
          "required": ["invoice_number", "customer"],
          "properties": {
            "invoice_number": { "type": "string", "examples": ["INV-1042"] },
            "customer": { "type": "object" }
          }
        }
      }'

curl -sS https://api.galleyrender.com/v1/render \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GALLEY_API_KEY" \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{
        "template": "invoice@1",
        "format": "pdf",
        "data": { "invoice_number": "INV-1042", "customer": { "name": "Acme" } },
        "options": { "page_size": "Letter", "margin": "18mm" }
      }'

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

See the quickstart for the MCP path and the template gallery for the starter library.

Where the competitor’s numbers came from

Note

Every PDFMonkey figure on this page was read from PDFMonkey’s own pricing and documentation pages on 2026-09-24, listed under Sources. Where a number or a feature wasn’t on the pages we read, this page says so rather than guessing.

Sources

All accessed 2026-09-24.

• PDFMonkey pricing — https://www.pdfmonkey.io/pricing
• PDFMonkey documentation home — https://pdfmonkey.io/docs/
• PDFMonkey Documents API reference (sync vs async, signed URL expiry, output type) — https://pdfmonkey.io/docs/api/documents/
• PDFMonkey Templates API reference (template fields, sample data) — https://pdfmonkey.io/docs/api/templates/
• “Using Dynamic Data” guide — https://pdfmonkey.io/docs/code-templates/defining-dynamic-data/
• PDFMonkey MCP server, official, on Glama (tool list and publisher) — https://glama.ai/mcp/servers/pdfmonkey/pdfmonkey-mcp
• Galley Render pricing — /pricing

Prices and limits change. Check https://www.pdfmonkey.io/pricing and our pricing page before deciding anything on these numbers.