CurlShot vs Routebase: Which Is Better in 2026?

CurlShot gives your app, your scripts and your AI agents a clear look at any web page.

ONE REQUEST
Send a page address, HTML or Markdown to one endpoint and get back an image (PNG, JPEG, WebP), a PDF, or a scrolling video (MP4, WebM, GIF). No SDK: anything that can fetch a URL already works, and the docs have examples for cURL, Node.js, Python, PHP, Go and Ruby.

WHAT PEOPLE BUILD WITH IT
- Link previews and website thumbnails
- Open Graph images rendered from HTML templates
- Visual checks of pages across phones, tablets and desktops
- PDF archives of web pages for records and compliance
- Reports and certificates from Markdown or HTML
- AI agents that need to see a page, through MCP

DETAILS THAT SAVE TIME
Cookie banners and ads hidden before the capture. Lazy images loaded. Dark mode on request. Wait for a selector, click a button, inject CSS. Cache results and reuse them for free. Signed links so a key never appears in your HTML. Async jobs, webhooks and bulk runs of up to 100 pages.

WHO IT IS FOR
Developers adding previews or PDFs to a product, teams automating reports and checks in n8n or their own scripts, and builders giving AI agents a way to look at web pages.

PRICES
A free plan with 100 screenshots a month and no card. Paid plans have a fixed monthly price: $19, $79 or $249. Yearly billing gets 2 months free. 14-day money-back guarantee.

Try it without an account at https://curlshot.com

What problem it solves

Running headless browsers in production is fragile: cookie banners, lazy images, timeouts, memory and queues. Developers who need screenshots, PDFs or page videos in their apps, pipelines or AI agents get them from one HTTP request instead.

Alternatives & competitors

An alternative to running Puppeteer or Playwright yourself, and to other screenshot APIs.

Your API rarely lives in one place. It lives in a spec file, a documentation site, a set of mocks, a test suite and a monitoring tool, and every copy drifts on its own schedule until that drift turns into bugs. Routebase removes the drift by deriving all of those surfaces from one living OpenAPI spec, so a single publish reaches every one of them at once.

That spec is built in a first-class visual API designer rather than in a text editor. You create endpoints, request and response bodies, parameters, examples and reusable schema components through a real interface, so nobody on the team has to hand-edit YAML or JSON to change the contract. Existing APIs come in through OpenAPI import, and you can export the spec or a Postman collection whenever you need it elsewhere. You also work on specs the way you work on code, with branches, merge requests, review and breaking-change detection before anything ships.

From that one design, Routebase generates the rest of the lifecycle. Your documentation portal, your mock servers and your contract tests all follow the published spec, so frontend and backend can build in parallel from day one against mocks that actually match the contract.

Because the spec is the source, Routebase can also tell you what moved. It validates live responses against the contract and reports field-level diffs, so a missing field or a changed type surfaces before a consumer ever hits it. Security scanning, governance rules and style-guide enforcement keep every spec consistent as the team grows.

Every workspace also ships a built-in MCP server that covers the full feature set of the product. Agents in Visual Studio Code, Claude, Codex or Cursor design endpoints, run test suites and lint specs under the same permissions your team already has, so no glue code is needed. Workspaces run in the EU or the US, and every account starts free with a 14-day Pro trial and no credit card.

What problem it solves

Most teams keep the same API in several places at once, and each of those copies drifts on its own schedule. Documentation goes stale, mocks stop matching what the API really returns, and test suites keep passing against a contract nobody has kept. The people who feel it are the ones who own the API. Backend developers ship a change that never reached the docs, and frontend engineers build against a mock that lies. QA chase failures that are not real, while whoever is on call debugs a payload that no longer matches the spec. Routebase closes that gap by making one published spec the source for documentation, mocks, contract tests and monitors, so a change reaches all of them in a single publish.

Alternatives & competitors

Routebase is an alternative to Postman, SwaggerHub, Stoplight, Apidog and Swagger UI. Each of those covers a part of the lifecycle, so teams end up running a design tool next to a docs generator, a standalone mock server and a separate test runner. The drift between those copies is exactly what breaks in production, because no single tool sees all of them. Routebase covers design, documentation, mocking, contract testing and monitoring from one living spec, and the spec itself is built in a full visual designer instead of hand-edited YAML. It then validates live responses against that spec with field-level diffs. Every workspace also ships an MCP server, so agents work the same source as the team under existing permissions.