Compare / open-source library
screen2api vs html2canvas
The default answer to "screenshot a div in JavaScript" for over a decade — a pure-JS renderer with an enormous install base and no dependencies.
Where html2canvas is the better choice
Genuinely — if any of these is your requirement, use them.
- Free and MIT-licensed, with no service behind it — captures never involve anyone else's server, and it works offline.
- A decade of Stack Overflow answers, wrappers and integrations. Whatever you hit, someone has hit it before you.
- No account, no key, no quota. npm install and you are capturing.
- The captures are occasional and cosmetic imperfection is acceptable.
- The budget for this feature is zero and you are happy to own the edge cases.
- Nothing may ever leave the page, not even to storage you control.
Where screen2api differs
Re-rendering vs reading what the browser decided
html2canvas parses your stylesheets and lays the page out again from scratch in JavaScript — a reimplementation of the browser, by necessity always behind it. CSS that shipped after its last release (1.4.1, January 2022) is where captures drift: container queries, newer color functions, whatever your third-party widgets do. screen2api reads the computed style of every node — the browser's own answer — so there is nothing to reimplement and nothing to fall behind on.
A canvas is the start of your work, not the end of it
html2canvas hands you a canvas. The upload, the storage, the webhook to your backend, the annotation UI, redaction that actually destroys pixels, a table exported as CSV rather than a picture of one — all of that is yours to build and maintain. The SDK is those parts, with the capture included.
Maintenance is your risk
The library last shipped in January 2022. It keeps working — but every browser release since is untested against it, and the issues you hit are yours to patch around. A service is on the hook for keeping capture current in a way an unmaintained dependency is not.
Try the capture on your own page
The playground runs the real SDK on a real page — no account, and the free tier is 500 captures a month when you're ready.