Benchmark Comparison
These benchmarks compare ZingPDF with PDFsharp, PdfPig, and iText on in-memory .NET workloads including page access, plain-text extraction, page appends, and document merges.
ZingPDF is strongest on access-heavy and extraction-heavy workloads in the current suite, and it is highly competitive on realistic write workflows.
The current benchmark set highlights especially strong results for page access, plain-text extraction, and page-append workflows.
Methodology
.NET 8 on Windows 11, measured with BenchmarkDotNet on a 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13700HX.
Benchmarks use fully buffered MemoryStream inputs, so the results emphasize parser and
object-model efficiency rather than disk or network I/O.
This page focuses on representative workloads: access, extraction, append, and merge. Rendering and remote linearized access are not covered here.
Highlights are based on workloads where the compared libraries are performing equivalent work. Some page-access rows are omitted when a library exposes a materially different execution path on the fixture.
Results
Fastest in the current comparison set.
Faster than PdfPig and far ahead of iText on the text-heavy fixture.
Fastest among the current libraries on the mixed-workload write path.
Close to the leading result in the current suite on the larger merge path.
Snapshot
Snapshot
Snapshot
Snapshot
Access
| Workload | ZingPDF | PDFsharp | PdfPig | iText |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open minimal PDF | 6.17 µs | 11.33 µs | 93.21 µs | 58.04 µs |
| Open larger real-world PDF | 6.39 µs | 7.46 ms | 285.07 µs | 23.45 ms |
| Open and count pages, larger real-world PDF | 112.32 µs | 7.84 ms | 299.33 µs | 19.30 ms |
| Open and get first page, mixed workload | 80.48 µs | 1.11 ms | Not shown | 3.67 ms |
| Open and get middle page, mixed workload | 185.58 µs | 1.08 ms | Not shown | 3.89 ms |
| Open and get last page, mixed workload | 178.20 µs | 1.01 ms | Not shown | 3.90 ms |
Extraction
| Workload | ZingPDF | PdfPig | iText |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open and extract first-page plain text | 53.39 ms | 73.04 ms | 332.47 ms |
| Extract full-document plain text | 475.06 ms | 608.55 ms | 4.37 s |
Writes
| Workload | ZingPDF | PDFsharp | iText |
|---|---|---|---|
| Append 1 page to mixed-workload PDF and save | 1.64 ms | 2.87 ms | 7.77 ms |
| Append 10 pages to mixed-workload PDF and save | 1.68 ms | 3.35 ms | 8.08 ms |
| Merge text-heavy PDF into mixed-workload PDF and save | 30.63 ms | 30.14 ms | 29.11 ms |
Summary
ZingPDF delivers excellent performance on seekable-stream access, plain-text extraction, and realistic page-append workflows, while staying highly competitive on larger merge scenarios.