Compare PdfPig vs IronPDF for .NET PDF Projects in C#

If you're working in .NET and looking for a fast, simple way to extract content from PDF files, PdfPig is a great place to start. It's open-source, lightweight, and well-suited for reading PDF files without unnecessary overhead. While it doesn’t support document creation, it's more than capable when it comes to text extraction and presentation format PDF pages.

On the other hand, if you're building an application that requires creating, editing, or styling PDF files, a full-featured tool like IronPDF is more suitable. We'll touch on both, focusing on how PdfPig works, while showing how IronPDF handles the same (and more) scenarios.

📦 Installing PdfPig for PDFs in C

To get started with PdfPig in your .NET project, you’ll need to install the NuGet package. It targets .NET Standard, making it compatible with .NET Core and .NET Framework projects.

Use the following command in the terminal or your .csproj environment:

dotnet add package PdfPig

Or from the NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio:

Install-Package PdfPig

Once installed, you're ready to open and read PDF files using simple C# code.

🔍 Extract Text from PDF Files using PdfPig

Let’s begin with a basic use case: extracting text from a PDF file. This is ideal when you need to index documents or run keyword searches.

Here’s how you can open a PDF document and loop through each page to extract its text:

using UglyToad.PdfPig;


using var document = PdfDocument.Open("samplePDF.pdf");
foreach (var page in document.GetPages())
{
    Console.WriteLine(page.Text);
}

This outputs the text content of each page file to the console. PDFPig handles multi-page PDFs seamlessly. However, it currently supports only ASCII text, so Unicode or styled content may be partially lost or misrepresented. It’s great for extracting raw text but doesn’t preserve complex formatting, layout, or document structure from the Portable Document Format.

Output:

📐 Extracting Words with Position Information in PdfPig

When you need to analyze layout, such as determining where specific text appears on a page (e.g., invoice parsing or OCR overlays). PDFPig provides access to word-level geometry by parsing tokenized PDF document content, allowing you to reconstruct the layout without rendering.

Here’s how you can extract individual words along with their bounding box coordinates:

using UglyToad.PdfPig;



using var document = PdfDocument.Open("samplePDF.pdf");
var page = document.GetPage(1);

foreach (var word in page.GetWords())
{
    Console.WriteLine($"Word: {word.Text} at X: {word.BoundingBox.Left}, Y: {word.BoundingBox.Top}");
}

This gives you precise control over how and where content appears on the page, which can be essential for building visual representations or extracting structured data from tables. This is helpful for building overlays or understanding pdf coordinates in OCR or invoice parsing scenarios.
Output:

🧾 Now Let’s Try IronPDF for the Same Use Case

If you want to extract text — but with improved accuracy, formatting, and the potential to later modify or create PDF documents — IronPDF is a more complete toolkit.

Installing IronPDF to Work with PDF Files in C

To install IronPDF, simply add it via NuGet:

dotnet add package IronPdf

Or in the Visual Studio Package Manager:

Install-Package IronPdf

It works on Windows, Linux, and macOS (with Docker for non-Windows environments). You’ll be able to do text extraction, generate PDFs from HTML, edit existing files, and much more.

📂 Loading an Existing PDF File with IronPDF

IronPDF makes it simple to load an existing PDF file and begin working with its contents immediately — whether for text extraction, editing, or analysis. You can instantiate the document with just one line:

PdfDocument document = new PdfDocument("pdfDocument.pdf");

This loads the PDF into memory so you can begin performing operations such as merging, splitting, redacting, or analyzing page content. Once the document loaded, IronPDF gives you full access to the page file, structure, and any embedded files or metadata it contains. It adheres fully to the PDF specification, making it suitable for enterprise-grade document processing.

🧠 Extract Text from PDF Files Using IronPDF

Let’s extract all text from a PDF file just like we did with PdfPig — but this time with IronPDF, which handles spacing and layout more naturally:

using IronPDF

var pdf = PdfDocument.FromFile("samplePDF.pdf");
var allText = pdf.ExtractAllText();
Console.WriteLine(allText);

The output preserves spacing and structure more closely to the original document — especially with multi-column layouts or styled text.

IronPDF provides text and path operations while preserving layout — even in multi-column documents — giving a more accurate resultant document when structure matters.

✏️ Bonus: Creating a PDF with IronPDF

Unlike PdfPig, IronPDF can create documents from scratch. Here’s an example where we render a simple HTML string as a styled PDF:

using IronPDF;  


var htmlContent = "<h1>Invoice</h1><p>Thanks for your purchase!</p>";
var Renderer = new ChromePdfRenderer();
var pdf = Renderer.RenderHtmlAsPdf(htmlContent);
pdf.SaveAs("invoice.pdf");

This is perfect for dynamic invoice generation, templated reports, or any document that starts as HTML or Razor content.

📄 Output (Invoice.pdf):

A PDF file that includes styled content:

This produces styled documents with support for compressed font files, CSS, and embedded assets.

🔁 Let’s Try This in PdfPig (Can It Do the Same?)

This is where PdfPig hits a limitation. PdfPig is read-only. It lacks a rendering engine, an HTML parser, and the ability to generate new PDF documents.

Here’s what trying to “create a PDF” would look like with PdfPig:

// Not possible with PdfPig
// No API exists for HTML rendering or PDF generation.

📄 Output:
None. PdfPig does not support HTML-to-PDF or PDF creation.

💡 Advanced IronPDF Example: HTML with Styling, Image, and Table

Let’s push IronPDF a bit further and generate a styled invoice with a logo, table, and footer.

using IronPDF;




           var html = @"
<html>
  <head>
    <style>
      body { font-family: Arial; padding: 20px; }
      .logo { width: 120px; }
      table { border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%; margin-top: 20px; }
      th, td { border: 1px solid #ccc; padding: 8px; text-align: left; }
      .footer { margin-top: 40px; font-size: 12px; color: gray; }
    </style>
  </head>
  <body>
    <img src='image.png' class='logo'/>
    <h1>Invoice #INV-1001</h1>
    <p>Date: 2025-06-18</p>
    <table>
      <tr><th>Item</th><th>Qty</th><th>Price</th></tr>
      <tr><td>Book</td><td>2</td><td>$10</td></tr>
      <tr><td>Pen</td><td>5</td><td>$2</td></tr>
    </table>
    <div class='footer'>Generated with IronPDF</div>
  </body>
</html>
";

            var Renderer = new ChromePdfRenderer();
            var pdf = Renderer.RenderHtmlAsPdf(html);
            pdf.SaveAs("styled_invoice.pdf");

📄Output (styled_invoice.pdf):
A beautifully styled PDF with a logo, table layout, and consistent branding — matching browser-rendered HTML output.

⚖️ HTML to PDF – IronPDF vs PdfPig Comparison

📌 Conclusion: PdfPig vs IronPDF — Choose What Fits

PDFPig is a lightweight tool ideal for projects that focus solely on reading text from PDFs. It shines when you don’t need to modify files, works well with .NET Standard, and is open source — ideal for console utilities, indexing, or backend data extraction jobs.

IronPDF, in contrast, offers a complete solution — from text extraction to PDF creation, editing, redaction, image handling, and HTML-to-PDF conversion. It's particularly helpful when you're building customer-facing apps or reports where output formatting matters.

⚠️ IronPDF is a commercial product, but it comes with a free trial that lets you explore all features before committing. For teams or businesses, the licensing ensures long-term support, updates, and performance tuning that open-source libraries often lack — making it a valuable investment when your project moves beyond just reading PDFs.

🔐 Licensing & Free Trial

IronPDF is a licensed product, but offers a fully functional free trial. You can explore all features without limits (watermark applies), making it easy to test your use case before investing. For commercial teams, it ensures:

• Long-term support & feature updates
• Cross-platform deployment (Windows, Linux, Docker, Azure)
• Fast performance with multi-threading & async support
• Seamless integration into enterprise CI/CD workflows

🚀 Next Steps

• Try IronPDF Free Trial for full-featured PDF rendering in C#
• Explore PdfPig GitHub if you're interested in PDF internals and raw text extraction
• Use PdfPig when you need lightweight, text-focused tasks
• Choose IronPDF for enterprise applications with styled, rich PDF output