Crixaa vs Carbone

Carbone's template is an office file: you open a DOCX, ODT, XLSX or PPTX in Word, LibreOffice, OnlyOffice or Google Docs and type merge tags into it. Crixaa's template is a vector design canvas in the browser that saves to its own layout format, and nearly every other difference between the two products is a consequence of that one choice.

So this page is about one axis only — who authors the template, and in what tool. On most other axes Carbone covers more ground than we do, and it is worth getting that out of the way first rather than burying it.

Where Carbone is ahead, plainly

Three more things belong in Carbone's column. The Docker REST API starts without a licence key, so a self-hosted deployment with unlimited documents, templates, parallel renders and servers costs nothing on the On-Premise Free tier — that is a real answer for data-residency, air-gapped or high-volume work, and we have no equivalent. The embeddable library is open source, which means you can read it, fork it and keep running it if the company changes direction. And Carbone's self-reported benchmarks are roughly 10 ms per report without conversion and roughly 50 ms with PDF conversion, measured on a mid-2015 MacBook Pro and excluding LibreOffice cold start.

One axis we will not pretend to have: Crixaa holds no compliance certifications of any kind — no SOC 2, no ISO 27001, no HIPAA and no BAA. We did not check Carbone's security policy, so we make no claim about theirs either way; read it yourself. If SOC 2 is a line on your procurement checklist, we fail it and the rest of this page is moot.

The authoring model is the whole comparison

Carbone's documentation is candid that most of the skill is mastering your text editor and only a small part is learning its tag language. Tags are written between curly braces, with namespaces for the main data object, a complement object, aliases, translations and render options, and formatters chain onto a tag with a colon.

The payoff is that native office constructs work exactly as authored, because the template is the office file: headers and footers, watermarks, pagination and page totals, pivot tables, cross-references, tables of contents, repeating a table header across a page break, automatic table resizing, footnotes and comments. Every one of those is something a canvas-based tool has to implement itself, and we have not implemented all of them.

The cost is that Word is a word processor. If the document is a certificate, a label, a packing insert or anything where placement is the point, the template author spends the afternoon fighting text flow. Crixaa's canvas is a vector editor: bezier path editing with control handles, boolean union and subtract on shapes, custom polygons, layers, smart guides, rulers and page presets. None of the document tools we compared has a design canvas at all — this is the one axis where there is no argument to have.

There is a second, quieter difference. Text and table geometry on the Crixaa canvas is measured by the PDF engine itself rather than by the browser, so what you position is what the renderer computes. That coverage is partial and we should say so: lists, images and shapes are not measured this way yet.

Our own trade-offs on this axis are real. Three embedded font families only — Inter, Source Serif 4 and JetBrains Mono — and anything else is mapped, not honoured. No engine version pinning. Generation is synchronous inside one HTTP request, with no async job and no callback URL.

Two things a Word file cannot do

A DOCX template lives in a file store. Two people editing it is a copy, a rename and a merge, and the merge is done by whoever remembers to do it.

Crixaa templates are co-edited in real time, with live cursors, follow mode and threaded comments anchored to individual elements, so a reviewer can point at this total rather than describing where it is. None of the five document tools we compared has collaborative editing of any kind.

The second is the review gate. Crixaa has an approval workflow: requested changes block a commit, and multi-step approvals run in a defined order before a template version can ship. Generation then runs against a committed version, so you can point at exactly which one produced a given document. A template that lives as a file has no equivalent — approval is a message in a chat thread.

Carbone's site does list a template studio and template manager, and we could not verify what they do, so nothing above should be read as a claim about them. Treat this section as a comparison against the office-file authoring path, which is the path the product is built around.

What comes back with the document

Carbone's homepage claims output is deterministic and byte-identical every time. That is a vendor claim we have not independently verified, but if it holds it is a genuinely useful property for regression testing.

Crixaa answers the same question from the other end. Every generation returns a sha256 of the exact bytes the caller receives, and anyone can check a PDF at crixaa.com/verify without an account: the file is hashed in the browser and never uploaded, and the response says only whether that digest was issued and when.

The honest caveat is the signature. Crixaa's signing certificate is self-signed, so Adobe Reader will report that the signature's validity is unknown rather than showing a green tick. It is not CA-trusted signing and we will not imply that it is. What it gives you is a fingerprint you can compare, which is a smaller claim than a trusted signature and a different one from determinism.

Carbone details worth reading before you commit

None of these cancel out the advantages above. They are the things that surprise people six months in.

• The licence is the Carbone Community License Agreement, effective 14 February 2023 and modelled on the Timescale License Agreement. It is not an OSI-approved open-source licence, and npm reports the licence field as pointing at the repository's LICENSE.md.
• Section 2.2 of that licence prohibits using the Community Edition to offer document-generation-as-a-service to third parties, other than as part of your own value-added product. Embedding it inside a broader product is permitted; reselling document generation itself is not.
• The embeddable open-source library trails the Docker edition. The README says it is always one major version behind; on 20 August 2026 the published npm package was 3.8.2, released 7 April 2026, against a v5-plus Docker edition — two majors, not one.
• The free Docker REST API runs Community features only: substitutions, repetitions, formatters, translations, conditions and simple math. Pictures, charts, barcodes, HTML rendering, colours, hyperlinks, forms, aggregators, transforms, file operations and signatures are Enterprise. Dynamic images and charts are not in the free self-hosted build.
• Self-hosting the library for PDF means running LibreOffice as an external dependency, in headless server mode with a worker pool. Without LibreOffice you can still emit docx, xlsx, pptx, odt, ods, odp and html, provided the template is already in that format.
• Two documented gaps, stated by the vendor rather than by us: dynamic sheet creation is not yet supported in XLSX templates (the workaround is to author in ODS and convert), and dynamic slide creation is not yet supported in PPTX (author in ODP and convert). XLSX sheet names cap at 31 characters.

Pricing, and what counts as a document

Carbone's Cloud free tier is 100 documents a month with 100 templates and one parallel render. Paid Cloud tiers step through 1,000, 5,000, 20,000, 100,000 and 500,000 documents a month, with template ceilings from 500 to 10,000 and parallel renders from 2 to 50. There is no page limit on any plan. Prices exclude VAT and are subject to French VAT, with exemption available on an intra-Community VAT number; there are no refunds once a subscription has been used.

A caution on the figures themselves: the pricing page rendered in euros when it was read on 20 August 2026, but we could not verify whether those amounts are localised by region, so read the page from where you actually are before budgeting. The AWS private-cloud tier is unambiguously in US dollars and is usage-billed: $0.15 each for the first 100 documents, $0.08 for 101 to 1,000, $0.03 for 1,001 to 10,000, and $0.008 above 10,001.

Two metering details matter more than the headline numbers. A document is counted each time a report is generated with injected data — JSON plus images — smaller than 1 MB, and a payload above 1 MB counts as two, so image-heavy payloads consume the allowance faster than the tier suggests. And on monthly Cloud plans unused documents do not roll over; annual billing converts the allowance into a pool you can spend across the year.

On-premise is sold differently: a Free tier at no cost with unlimited documents, templates, analytics, parallel renders and servers plus a 30-day Enterprise trial, then a Fit tier at 12,000 documents on one server and an Unlimited tier with a lifetime licence. Both paid on-premise tiers are sales-led — you book a meeting rather than checking out. Support is tiered too: no chat support on Free, P1 on the two Essential plans, P2 on the Advanced plans.

Crixaa's paid plans are ₹999 and ₹1,999 a month, billed through Razorpay and denominated in rupees. If your finance team needs to be invoiced in USD or EUR, we cannot do that today. Fifty templates open without an account and one watermarked PDF downloads without signing up, so you can judge the canvas before deciding anything.

Which one to pick

Choose Carbone if the template must be a Word or Excel file owned by someone in finance or legal; if you need output that is not a PDF; if you need to self-host, keep data in the EU or run air-gapped; if you need PDF/A, PDF/UA or Factur-X; or if you want an official SDK in your language and a Zapier or Make integration. Those are not small requirements and we meet none of them.

Choose Crixaa if the document is a design rather than a text document, if more than one person edits the template and you would rather they did it at the same time than by passing a file around, if a template change should be blocked until someone approves it, and if you want a verifiable digest of every PDF you issue. That is the ground we can defend, and we would rather name it precisely than claim more.