You're building an ASP.NET Core MVC application. Product owners want "Export to PDF" buttons on reports. You search ".NET MVC PDF" and Rotativa appears with clean examples showing return new ViewAsPdf() . It looks simple—until you deploy to Linux and discover wkhtmltopdf binary incompatibilities, or move to Azure App Service and hit file permission errors, or try to generate PDFs outside controller actions and find the API doesn't support it. Rotativa is a convenient wrapper for ASP.NET MVC controllers, but it's architecturally constrained to web request contexts and carries the operational complexity of managing the wkhtmltopdf binary. This comparison exists because Rotativa and IronPDF both generate PDFs from HTML in .NET, but they make fundamentally different architectural choices. Rotativa wraps wkhtmltopdf (an external Qt WebKit-based command-line tool) for MVC controller convenience. IronPDF embeds a Chromium rendering engine as a library component.…