Brevier as an alternative to iText
What differs between iText and Brevier.
| Topic | Brevier | iText |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Paid. No AGPL. | AGPLv3, or a paid licence. |
| Publish your source | No. | Under the AGPL, yes: all of it, your own code too. |
| Price | €3,990 per server a year. | No list price. About $45,000 a year on average (Vendr, 5 deals). |
| Add-ons | Everything included. | Extra licence key for add-ons such as pdfCalligraph. |
| HTML and CSS | Yes. The template is HTML and CSS. | Add-on pdfHTML: static HTML5 and CSS3. |
| HTML to PDF languages | Java, Python, TypeScript, .NET. | pdfHTML: Java and .NET only. |
| Hyphenation | Yes. German compounds too, built in. | In code, for each Text object. |
| PDF/A | Yes. Every PDF is PDF/A-3b. | Yes, with code for level, ICC profile and fonts. |
| Tables | Header repeats on every page. | Large tables: you fill them in steps. |
| Moving over | No importer for iText code. | From iText 5 to 7: migration effort expected. |
| Layout code | Invoice example: 19 lines of HTML, 16 of CSS. | The layout is Java or C# code, object by object. |
| Your data | Pass your own objects. Java, Python, TypeScript, .NET. | You write each field into the layout in code. |
| Layout check | Yes. brevier lint finds overflow and missing glyphs, in CI. | None found in its documentation. |
| Adoption | Version 0.6.0, a new product. | 2,261 GitHub stars (Nov 2026). |
Moving from iText
Write your first Brevier document, then move your iText layout over