---
source: https://carbone.io/documentation/developer/under-the-hood/overview.html
title: "Overview of how Carbone works"
description: "Document generation in two phases: the template engine and the document converter"
generated_at: "2026-07-13"
---

# How Carbone works

Document generation in two phases: the template engine and the document converter

Document generation with Carbone is performed in two phases.

![Carbone document generation processing](/img/doc/carbone-processing.svg)

**The first step**, `Template Engine` is the heart of the system. It parses the template and inserts the data to generate reports. This part is open core, namely [CarboneJS](https://github.com/carboneio/carbone).

**The second step**, `Document Converter` converts the generated report to another file format (ex. DOCX to PDF). LibreOffice, Onlyoffice and Chromium are executed and managed by Carbone. It has many advantages for queue management, optimisation, security, monitoring, etc.

-   LibreOffice is used to convert most documents
-   Onlyoffice is LibreOffice's challenger for DOCX/XLSX/PPTX templates.
-   Chromium is used to convert HTML to PDF

In addition to this engine, we provide `Studio`, a User Interface for simplifying the creation and management of templates. It also gives you some statistics.

> ℹ️ **Note:** All this processing is available with our turnkey solution or with your dedicated instances via a [simple API](/documentation/developer/http-api/introduction.md).

## Related topics

- [Architecture guideline](/documentation/developer/under-the-hood/architecture-guideline.md)