SelectPDF is a service that allows you to generate PDFs of webpages in your Bubble.io app. It’s one of the oldest PDF solutions available for Bubble and has an official Bubble plugin that allows users to integrate with it.
However, SelectPDF was not designed to work specifically with Bubble. It's a great general purpose tool but the plugin can be frustrating to use if you're trying to generate detailed, multi-page PDFs or add things like headers and page breaks. In this post we'll discuss the pros and cons of using SelectPDF and compare it to PDF Potion, a PDF tool built specifically for Bubble.
SelectPDF
SelectPDF is a Romanian company that offers a number of PDF-related services, including:
An online web page to PDF converter
HTML to PDF API
The Bubble SelectPDF plugin essentially takes the HTML to PDF API and allows users to access it in their Bubble apps. It can be used to generate PDFs of specific pages in your Bubble app.
The SelectPDF plugin works reasonably well if you’re generating straightforward, short PDFs. However, you can quickly run into limitations if you try to generate PDFs with page breaks, headers / footers or if your PDF contains a lot of dynamic data.
PDF Potion
PDF Potion is a PDF solution developed specifically for Bubble by Cranford Tech, a leading Bubble plugin developer. PDF Potion was released in 2024, while Cranford Tech has been developing Bubble plugins since 2022.
PDF Potion was designed to overcome the limitations with the existing Bubble PDF plugins. We previously created a popular PDF plugin called PDF Creator (it remains one of the highest rated PDF plugins in the Bubble marketplace), but we kept getting customer requests for features that it wasn’t initially designed to handle. We decided to take all this feedback and use it to create the most powerful PDF solution - PDF Potion was born.
Here are some of the factors to consider when deciding whether SelectPDF is the right solution for generating PDFs in your Bubble app.
Page breaks
If you’re generating PDFs that you know will never be longer than 1 page, then you probably don’t care about page breaks (where one page of the PDF ends and the next one starts). However, when you start creating larger PDFs you’ll quickly realise it’s crucial to have control over page breaks.
The SelectPDF Bubble plugin gives very little control over page breaks. It does give you the ability to ‘Keep images together’ but there’s no way to ensure a specific element starts on a new page of your PDF.
PDF Potion gives you total control over page breaks. You can:
Add page breaks to specific elements
Start each cell of a repeating group on a new page
Add ‘smart breaks’ that add a page break to an element only if it’s otherwise going to be split across two pages (useful if you’re dealing with dynamic content of an unknown length)
You can see full details of how to add page breaks in this section of the PDF Potion documentation.
Custom headers / footers
If you want your PDF to look professional, you’re probably going to want to add custom headers or footers. You may want to include things like:
Company name
A logo
Text relating to a trademark or privacy policy
Page numbers
The SelectPDF plugin does not give you the ability to add any of these things to your PDF. There are no footer or header fields available with the plugin.
PDF Potion handles all of these items. You can add custom text (either static or dynamic), page numbers and images to the headers and footers of your PDF.
Creating PDFs on an agency plan
If you’re on a Bubble agency plan, the app you’re working on will be password protected until you transfer it to your client. This means you won’t be able to use SelectPDF during the time the app remains on the agency plan - the login wall will block SelectPDF from generating the PDF. On the other hand, PDF Potion does allow you to generate PDFs when you’re on an agency plan. See this section of the documentation for full details.
Ease of setup
Both PDF Potion and SelectPDF are relatively straightforward to set up. You need to register for an account and get a licence key to get started, install the plugin and then use the relevant workflow action.
PDF Potion does require you to set up a backend workflow to receive the PDF which results in a small amount of additional work. This is required to ensure there are no ‘timeout’ issues with the PDF Creation and so that your user always gets the PDF they’re expecting.
