Newest update:

We switched over to IronPdf but another team at our company could not because it didn't offer functionality that they needed. Recently another team started a project to do PDF rendering and needed similar functionality. It always bugged me that our company was paying for two licenses for software that did the same thing so I decided to see if newer versions of HiQ resolved the performance issues we were having.

The newest version of HiQ .Net does have some performance improvements, even outperforming IronPdf on some reports. But it is still choking on the really large report that made us switch in the first place.

The big story, however, is that HiQ has a new API call HiQ Chromium that performs an order of magnitude better the IronPdf and the older .Net version. I literally reran my tests multiple times and sent my application test bed to another dev to double check my work because I didn't believe the numbers I was seeing. It converts a copy of one report in 9s that IronPdf takes 50s to convert, 5 seconds for another that Iron PDF takes 37s, and 9s for a third that IronPdf takes 143s.