Microlink Benchmarks

A collection of benchmark tools that race Microlink APIs against competing services — one benchmark per product.

Each sub-folder is a self-contained benchmark with its own dependencies, adapters, and results.

Benchmarks

Folder	Product	Competitors tested
screenshot/	Screenshot API	ScreenshotOne, ScreenshotMachine, ScreenshotAPI, Urlbox, ApiFlash, ScreenshotLayer

Methodology

To ensure a strictly objective baseline, each benchmark is built as a reproducible testing suite. Here is exactly how data is captured and aggregated:

True Cold Starts — Every request bypasses edge caching and warm browser pools. We measure the total round-trip latency: HTTP request → Headless Chrome boot → DOM render → pixel capture.

Concurrent Execution — All providers are triggered simultaneously for each target URL. If a target website experiences a latency spike or routing bottleneck, every provider faces the exact same conditions.

10× Global Polling — To account for AWS/GCP load balancing and natural internet traffic fluctuations, each benchmark is executed 10 separate times.

Heavy Browser Workloads — Tests go beyond simple viewport captures. Payload configurations force high device scale factors (Retina/2× resolution), full-page scrolling, and active ad-blocking across a mix of static HTML and heavy React SPAs.

Outlier & Error Mitigation — To prevent a single anomalous DNS timeout (e.g. a 25,000 ms spike) from corrupting the dataset, the single slowest execution out of the 10 runs is systematically dropped. Any request returning a non-200 HTTP error is also isolated and removed.

Final Aggregation — After cleaning the dataset, we calculate the strict avgColdDuration per URL and sum them into a totalColdDuration to determine the fastest overall provider.

Screenshot Benchmark Results

Last run: March 2026 · 7 URLs · cold requests only (cache bypassed) · View full results →

Summary — Average Cold Duration

Rank	Adapter	Avg Cold (ms)	vs Fastest
1	Microlink	4,111.84	—
2	ScreenshotAPI	5,915.71	+43.9%
3	ScreenshotMachine	6,099.77	+48.4%
4	Urlbox	7,334.22	+78.4%
5	ScreenshotOne	7,711.14	+87.5%
6	ApiFlash	9,463.20	+130.1%

Per-URL Cold Duration (ms)

URL	Microlink	ScreenshotAPI	ScreenshotMachine	Urlbox	ScreenshotOne	ApiFlash
vercel.com (1920px, full-page, jpeg)	6,361	6,143	9,791	14,953	12,695	14,233
example.com (1280×800, png)	968	4,988	1,321	2,331	3,135	1,820
stripe.com (393×852, jpeg)	3,217	5,614	3,167	3,679	5,678	5,900
screenshotone.com (1920px, full-page, png)	5,474	6,805	12,404	14,976	12,139	9,802
news.ycombinator.com (1440px, full-page, jpeg)	3,435	5,385	4,329	4,748	6,857	1,968
github.com/trending (768×1024, png)	3,060	6,174	3,898	4,267	6,059	5,366
framer.com (1920×1800, jpeg)	6,267	6,301	7,789	6,386	7,415	27,154
Total	28.8 s	41.4 s	42.7 s	51.3 s	54.0 s	66.2 s

Structure

screenshot/    # Screenshot API benchmark
  adapters/    # One file per provider
  results/     # JSON output (gitignored)
  benchmark.js # Entry point
  ...
<next-tool>/   # Future benchmarks follow the same pattern

Running a benchmark

Navigate into the relevant folder and follow its README:

cd screenshot
npm install
cp .env.example .env   # add your API keys
node benchmark.js

Adding a new benchmark

1. Create a new folder named after the Microlink product (e.g. pdf/, scraper/).
2. Follow the same adapter pattern used in screenshot/ — each competitor is an isolated adapter file that exports a capture() function.
3. Add the new benchmark to the table above.