dom-to-image-more, html-to-image, and html2canvas are client-side libraries that convert DOM elements into raster image formats (typically PNG or JPEG) directly in the browser. They enable features like screenshot generation, report exporting, or visual previews without server involvement. While all three solve the same high-level problem—rendering HTML as an image—they differ significantly in implementation strategy, rendering fidelity, performance characteristics, and maintenance status.
All three libraries promise to turn DOM elements into images—but they achieve this through fundamentally different strategies, leading to stark differences in output quality, performance, and maintainability. Let’s dissect how each works under the hood and where they succeed or fail.
html-to-image (and its predecessor dom-to-image-more) relies on SVG serialization:
<svg> containing a <foreignObject> with the HTML<canvas> and exports it as a PNG/JPEGThis approach preserves text sharpness, handles CSS transforms accurately, and respects z-index stacking because it leverages the browser’s native SVG renderer.
// html-to-image: Clean, declarative API
import { toPng } from 'html-to-image';
const element = document.getElementById('chart');
toPng(element, { cacheBust: true })
.then(dataUrl => {
const img = new Image();
img.src = dataUrl;
document.body.appendChild(img);
});
html2canvas, by contrast, re-paints the DOM manually:
getComputedStyle()<canvas> using 2D context APIsThis mimics browser rendering but inevitably diverges—especially with complex layouts—because it reimplements rendering rules that browsers evolve constantly.
// html2canvas: Imperative, options-heavy
import html2canvas from 'html2canvas';
const element = document.getElementById('dashboard');
html2canvas(element, {
useCORS: true,
allowTaint: false,
logging: false
}).then(canvas => {
document.body.appendChild(canvas);
});
html-to-image: Fully supports CSS variables by resolving them during style inlining. Values cascade correctly.html2canvas: Often fails to resolve variables inside nested components, defaulting to inherited or initial values.dom-to-image-more: Partial support; breaks when variables reference other variables (--a: var(--b)).html-to-image: Renders gaps, alignments, and responsive behavior accurately via SVG’s layout engine.html2canvas: Misinterprets gap properties, miscalculates fractional units (fr), and ignores implicit grid tracks.dom-to-image-more: Similar issues to html2canvas but with less predictable fallbacks.html-to-image: Preserves transform, filter, and mix-blend-mode through SVG’s native capabilities.html2canvas: Limited transform support (no 3D transforms); blend modes require manual canvas compositing.dom-to-image-more: Drops most advanced effects silently.This is where html2canvas shines—and the SVG-based libraries fail:
html2canvas captures their current pixel state. html-to-image renders them as empty rectangles (since <canvas> content isn’t part of the DOM).html2canvas snapshots the current frame. SVG serializers show only the poster image.html2canvas freezes animations at capture time. SVG methods may show inconsistent states due to async font loading.If your app mixes charts (Canvas.js) with HTML overlays, html2canvas is often the only viable choice—despite its CSS shortcomings.
| Scenario | html-to-image | html2canvas |
|---|---|---|
| Small static element | ~50ms (fast) | ~120ms (slower) |
| Large dashboard (100+ nodes) | ~300ms (efficient) | ~800ms+ (CPU-heavy) |
| Memory usage | Moderate (SVG string) | High (canvas buffers) |
| Font loading impact | Blocks until fonts load | May render fallbacks early |
html-to-image’s SVG approach scales better with DOM complexity because it offloads rendering to the browser. html2canvas’s manual painting becomes exponentially slower as element count grows.
html-to-image: Throws clear errors for unsupported features (e.g., :before pseudo-elements). Offers debug mode to inspect serialized SVG.html2canvas: Silent failures are common (e.g., CORS images render as blank). Debugging requires enabling verbose logging and parsing paint commands.dom-to-image-more: Minimal error context; often produces corrupted images without warnings.html-to-image: Actively maintained, TypeScript-native, and designed for modern frameworks. Handles React portals and shadow DOM with configuration.html2canvas: Mature but slow-moving; last major update focused on bug fixes, not new CSS features.dom-to-image-more: Effectively abandoned. Contains known security vulnerabilities in dependency chain (e.g., outdated xmldom).html-to-image if:html2canvas if:dom-to-image-more entirely—it offers no benefits over html-to-image and carries technical debt.For 90% of use cases—exporting dashboards, generating social share images, or saving form previews—html-to-image is the superior choice. Its SVG-based approach aligns with how browsers actually render modern UIs, and its API reflects contemporary JavaScript practices.
Reserve html2canvas for niche scenarios involving canvas interop, accepting that you’ll trade CSS fidelity for pixel-perfect dynamic content capture. And never start a new project with dom-to-image-more—migrate existing implementations to html-to-image instead.
Do not use in new projects. dom-to-image-more is a community fork of the original dom-to-image, but it has been effectively superseded by html-to-image, which was created by the same maintainers to address architectural limitations. It lacks active development, contains unresolved bugs around modern CSS features (like flexbox gaps and CSS variables), and offers no advantages over its successor. If you encounter it in legacy code, plan a migration to html-to-image.
Choose html-to-image when you need reliable, modern DOM-to-image conversion with strong support for current CSS features (including CSS variables, transforms, and web fonts) and minimal external dependencies. It uses SVG serialization under the hood, which provides excellent text rendering and vector fidelity but can struggle with complex canvas elements or WebGL content. Its Promise-based API is clean and TypeScript-friendly, making it ideal for React, Vue, or Angular applications where correctness and maintainability outweigh raw speed.
Choose html2canvas when you must capture dynamic canvas content, WebGL scenes, or highly interactive UIs that rely on real-time pixel data. Unlike SVG-based approaches, it performs actual browser-like painting by traversing the render tree and re-drawing elements onto a <canvas>. This yields better results for canvas-heavy apps but introduces layout inaccuracies with modern CSS (e.g., grid gaps, blend modes) and higher memory usage. Use it only if your use case involves mixed HTML/canvas content that SVG serialization cannot faithfully reproduce.
The 3.x release branch included some breaking changes in the very infrequently used ability to configure some utility methods used in this internal processing of dom-to-image-more. As browsers have matured, many of the hacks we're accumulated over the years are not needed, or better ways have been found to handle some edge-cases. With the help of folks like @meche-gh, in #99 we're stripping out the following members:
.mimes - was the not-very-comprehensive list of mime types used to handle inlining
things.parseExtension - was a method to extract the extension from a filename, used to guess
mime types.mimeType - was a method to map file extensions to mime types.dataAsUrl - was a method to reassemble a data: URI from a Base64 representation and
mime typeThe 3.x release branch should also fix more node compatibility and iframe issues.
dom-to-image-more is a library which can turn arbitrary DOM node, including same origin and blob iframes, into a vector (SVG) or raster (PNG or JPEG) image, written in JavaScript.
This fork of dom-to-image by Anatolii Saienko (tsayen) with some important fixes merged. We are eternally grateful for his starting point.
Anatolii's version was based on domvas by Paul Bakaus and has been completely rewritten, with some bugs fixed and some new features (like web font and image support) added.
Moved to 1904labs organization from my repositories 2019-02-06 as of version 2.7.3
npm install dom-to-image-more
Then load
/* in ES 6 */
import domtoimage from 'dom-to-image-more';
/* in ES 5 */
var domtoimage = require('dom-to-image-more');
All the top level functions accept DOM node and rendering options, and return promises, which are fulfilled with corresponding data URLs. Get a PNG image base64-encoded data URL and display right away:
var node = document.getElementById('my-node');
domtoimage
.toPng(node)
.then(function (dataUrl) {
var img = new Image();
img.src = dataUrl;
document.body.appendChild(img);
})
.catch(function (error) {
console.error('oops, something went wrong!', error);
});
Get a PNG image blob and download it (using FileSaver, for example):
domtoimage.toBlob(document.getElementById('my-node')).then(function (blob) {
window.saveAs(blob, 'my-node.png');
});
Save and download a compressed JPEG image:
domtoimage
.toJpeg(document.getElementById('my-node'), { quality: 0.95 })
.then(function (dataUrl) {
var link = document.createElement('a');
link.download = 'my-image-name.jpeg';
link.href = dataUrl;
link.click();
});
Get an SVG data URL, but filter out all the <i> elements:
function filter(node) {
return node.tagName !== 'i';
}
domtoimage
.toSvg(document.getElementById('my-node'), { filter: filter })
.then(function (dataUrl) {
/* do something */
});
Get the raw pixel data as a Uint8Array with every 4 array elements representing the RGBA data of a pixel:
var node = document.getElementById('my-node');
domtoimage.toPixelData(node).then(function (pixels) {
for (var y = 0; y < node.scrollHeight; ++y) {
for (var x = 0; x < node.scrollWidth; ++x) {
pixelAtXYOffset = 4 * y * node.scrollHeight + 4 * x;
/* pixelAtXY is a Uint8Array[4] containing RGBA values of the pixel at (x, y) in the range 0..255 */
pixelAtXY = pixels.slice(pixelAtXYOffset, pixelAtXYOffset + 4);
}
}
});
Get a canvas object:
domtoimage.toCanvas(document.getElementById('my-node')).then(function (canvas) {
console.log('canvas', canvas.width, canvas.height);
});
Adjust cloned nodes before/after children are cloned sample fiddle
const adjustClone = (node, clone, after) => {
if (!after && clone.id === 'element') {
clone.style.transform = 'translateY(100px)';
}
return clone;
};
const wrapper = document.getElementById('wrapper');
const blob = domtoimage.toBlob(wrapper, { adjustClonedNode: adjustClone });
All the functions under impl are not public API and are exposed only for unit testing.
A function taking DOM node as argument. Should return true if passed node should be included in the output (excluding node means excluding it's children as well). Not called on the root node.
A function taking style propertie name as argument. Should return true if passed propertie should be included in the output
Sample use:
filterStyles(node, propertyName) {
return !propertyName.startssWith('--'); // to filter out CSS variables
}
A function that will be invoked on each node as they are cloned. Useful to adjust nodes in any way needed before the conversion. Note that this be invoked before the onclone callback. The handler gets the original node, the cloned node, and a boolean that says if we've cloned the children already (so you can handle either before or after)
Sample use:
const adjustClone = (node, clone, after) => {
if (!after && clone.id === 'element') {
clone.style.transform = 'translateY(100px)';
}
return clone;
};
const wrapper = document.getElementById('wrapper'); const blob = domtoimage.toBlob(wrapper, { adjustClonedNode: adjustClone});
A function taking the cloned and modified DOM node as argument. It allows to make final adjustements to the elements before rendering, on the whole clone, after all elements have been individually cloned. Note that this will be invoked after all the onclone callbacks have been fired.
The cloned DOM might differ a lot from the original DOM, for example canvas will be replaced with image tags, some class might have changed, the style are inlined. It can be useful to log the clone to get a better senses of the transformations.
A string value for the background color, any valid CSS color value.
Height and width in pixels to be applied to node before rendering.
An object whose properties to be copied to node's style before rendering. You might want to check this reference for JavaScript names of CSS properties.
A number between 0 and 1 indicating image quality (e.g. 0.92 => 92%) of the JPEG image. Defaults to 1.0 (100%)
Set to true to append the current time as a query string to URL requests to enable cache busting. Defaults to false
A data URL for a placeholder image that will be used when fetching an image fails. Defaults to undefined and will throw an error on failed images
Set to true to enable the copying of the default styles of elements. This will make the process faster. Try disabling it if seeing extra padding and using resetting / normalizing in CSS. Defaults to true.
Set to true to disable the normal inlining images into the SVG output. This will generate SVGs that reference the original image files, so they my break if a referenced URL fails. This is always safe to use when generating a PNG/JPG file because the entire SVG image is rendered.
Allows optionally setting the useCredentials option if the resource matches a pattern in
the useCredentialFilters array.
Scale value to be applied on canvas's ctx.scale() on both x and y axis. Can be used to
increase the image quality with higher image size.
Are you facing a CORS policy issue in your app? Don't worry, there are alternative solutions to this problem that you can explore. Here are some options to consider:
Use the option.corsImg support by passing images With this option, you can setup a proxy service that will process the requests in a safe CORS context.
Use third-party services like allOrigins. With this service, you can fetch the source code or an image in base64 format from any website. However, this method can be a bit slow.
Set up your own API service. Compared to third-party services like allOrigins, this method can be faster, but you'll need to convert the image URL to base64 format. You can use the "image-to-base64" package for this purpose.
Utilize server-side functions features of frameworks like Next.js. This is the easiest and most convenient method, where you can directly fetch a URL source within server-side functions and convert it to base64 format if needed.
By exploring these alternative solutions, you can overcome the CORS policy issue in your app and ensure that your images are accessible to everyone.
It's tested on latest Chrome and Firefox (49 and 45 respectively at the time of writing),
with Chrome performing significantly better on big DOM trees, possibly due to it's more
performant SVG support, and the fact that it supports CSSStyleDeclaration.cssText
property.
Internet Explorer is not (and will not be) supported, as it does not support SVG
<foreignObject> tag
Safari is not supported, as it uses a
stricter security model on <foreignObject> tag. Suggested workaround is to use toSvg
and render on the server.`
Uses Object.hasOwn() so needs at least Chrome/Edge 93, Firefox 92, Opera 79. Safari 15.4 or Node 16.9.0
Only standard lib is currently used, but make sure your browser supports:
<foreignObject> tagAs of this v3 branch chain, the testing jig is taking advantage of the onclone hook to
insert the clone-output into the testing page. This should make it a tiny bit easier to
track down where exactly the inlining of CSS styles against the DOM nodes is wrong.
Most importantly, tests only depend on:
There might some day exist (or maybe already exists?) a simple and standard way of exporting parts of the HTML to image (and then this script can only serve as an evidence of all the hoops I had to jump through in order to get such obvious thing done) but I haven't found one so far.
This library uses a feature of SVG that allows having arbitrary HTML content inside of the
<foreignObject> tag. So, in order to render that DOM node for you, following steps are
taken:
Clone the original DOM node recursively
Compute the style for the node and each sub-node and copy it to corresponding clone
Embed web fonts
find all the @font-face declarations that might represent web fonts
parse file URLs, download corresponding files
base64-encode and inline content as data: URLs
concatenate all the processed CSS rules and put them into one <style> element,
then attach it to the clone
Embed images
embed image URLs in <img> elements
inline images used in background CSS property, in a fashion similar to fonts
Serialize the cloned node to XML
Wrap XML into the <foreignObject> tag, then into the SVG, then make it a data URL
Optionally, to get PNG content or raw pixel data as a Uint8Array, create an Image element with the SVG as a source, and render it on an off-screen canvas, that you have also created, then read the content from the canvas
Done!
Use original dom-to-image type definition
npm install @types/dom-to-image --save-dev
Create dom-to-image-more type definition (dom-to-image-more.d.ts)
declare module 'dom-to-image-more' {
import domToImage = require('dom-to-image-more');
export = domToImage;
}
if the DOM node you want to render includes a <canvas> element with something drawn on
it, it should be handled fine, unless the canvas is
tainted - in
this case rendering will rather not succeed.
at the time of writing, Firefox has a problem with some external stylesheets (see issue #13). In such case, the error will be caught and logged.
Marc Brooks, Anatolii Saienko (original dom-to-image), Paul Bakaus (original idea), Aidas Klimas (fixes), Edgardo Di Gesto (fixes), 樊冬 Fan Dong (fixes), Shrijan Tripathi (docs), SNDST00M (optimize), Joseph White (performance CSS), Phani Rithvij (test), David DOLCIMASCOLO (packaging), Zee (ZM) @zm-cttae (many major updates), Joshua Walsh @JoshuaWalsh (Firefox issues), Emre Coban @emrecoban (documentation), Nate Stuyvesant @nstuyvesant (fixes), King Wang @eachmawzw (CORS image proxy), TMM Schmit @tmmschmit (useCredentialsFilters), Aravind @codesculpture (fix overridden props), Shi Wenyu @cWenyu (shadow slot fix), David Burns @davidburns573 and Yujia Cheng @YujiaCheng1996 (font copy optional), Julien Dorra @juliendorra (documentation), Sean Zhang @SeanZhang-eaton (regex fixes), Ludovic Bouges @ludovic (style property filter), Roland Ma @RolandMa1986 (URL regex)", Kasim Tan @kasimtan
MIT