Urlbox

Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Urlbox

A curated collection of the 2 best self hosted alternatives to Urlbox.

Urlbox is a cloud API that captures pixel-accurate screenshots and PDFs of web pages from URLs. It supports full-page and viewport captures, device emulation, format options, and automation for thumbnails, previews, visual monitoring, and report generation.

Alternatives List

#1
FlareSolverr

FlareSolverr

FlareSolverr is a proxy server with a REST API that uses a headless Chrome session to solve Cloudflare/DDoS-GUARD challenges and return HTML and cookies.

FlareSolverr is a lightweight HTTP API service that helps automate access to websites protected by Cloudflare and similar challenge pages. It launches a real browser on demand to solve the challenge, then returns the final page content and/or the resulting cookies for reuse.

Key Features

  • REST API for automated fetches that require solving Cloudflare or DDoS-GUARD challenges
  • Headless browser automation using Selenium with an “undetected” Chrome driver approach
  • Session management to reuse a browser profile and cookies across multiple requests
  • Supports upstream proxies (including authenticated proxies) for outbound requests
  • Can return full rendered HTML, response metadata, only cookies, or a rendered screenshot (Base64 PNG)
  • Designed for containerized operation with official Docker images

Use Cases

  • Integrating with automation tools (for example, indexers or scrapers) that need challenge-solving
  • Fetching cookies to use with other HTTP clients after the browser completes the challenge
  • Debugging challenge behavior by capturing rendered output or screenshots

Limitations and Considerations

  • Each request may launch a new browser instance unless sessions are used, which can be memory-intensive
  • Challenge-solving can fail or change over time as protection providers update their mechanisms

FlareSolverr is best suited for controlled automation scenarios where a real browser is required to pass anti-bot challenges. Used carefully with session reuse and sensible concurrency limits, it can provide reliable challenge handling behind a simple API.

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#2
URL to PNG

URL to PNG

Self-hosted HTTP API to render web pages to PNG with configurable viewport, caching, Playwright-based parallel rendering, and S3/CouchDB/filesystem storage.

URL to PNG screenshot

URL to PNG is a self-hosted HTTP service that captures web pages and returns PNG images. It exposes a simple query-parameter API and uses Playwright for parallel, configurable headless rendering.

Key Features

  • HTTP endpoint that accepts query parameters (url, width, height, viewport size, isMobile, isFullPage, isDarkMode, deviceScaleFactor, forceReload) to customize screenshots
  • Playwright-based parallel rendering with configurable Playwright options for Chromium browsers
  • Support for full-page captures, mobile user agent emulation, dark-mode preference, and device scale factor (DPR)
  • Caching of generated images with option to force reload and configurable TTL
  • Storage integration options: local filesystem plus adapters for Amazon S3 and CouchDB
  • Allow-list support to restrict which domains may be captured
  • Optional encrypted request payloads using a server CRYPTO_KEY for added request privacy
  • Prometheus-compatible metrics endpoint for monitoring rendering activity and performance
  • Distributed-friendly build: Docker image available and local development via pnpm and Playwright browser installation

Use Cases

  • Embed dynamic website screenshots in HTML or newsletters by targeting the service endpoint
  • Generate social preview or thumbnail images for URLs programmatically
  • Automated visual checks, status dashboards, or scheduled snapshots for monitoring website appearance

Limitations and Considerations

  • Rendering uses headless browsers and can be CPU/memory intensive under high concurrency; capacity planning is required
  • Some sites may block headless browsers or use anti-bot measures that prevent accurate captures
  • Requires Playwright browser binaries to be installed for local runs and proper configuration of storage backends (S3/CouchDB) when used

URL to PNG is focused on simple, configurable screenshot generation for self-hosted environments. It is suitable for embedding into workflows, CI, or internal tooling where control over rendering and storage is required.

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Why choose an open source alternative?

  • •Data ownership: Keep your data on your own servers
  • •No vendor lock-in: Freedom to switch or modify at any time
  • •Cost savings: Reduce or eliminate subscription fees
  • •Transparency: Audit the code and know exactly what's running