hocuspocus VS notesnook

Hi HN! We're Nick, Patrick, Philip, Sebastian, Sven, and Timo from Titap (https://tiptap.dev/), an open source developer toolkit for building collaborative editing apps. Our editor framework, based on ProseMirror, is at https://github.com/ueberdosis/tiptap, and our real-time collaboration backend, based on Yjs, is at https://github.com/ueberdosis/hocuspocus.

Building editor interfaces like Notion or Google Docs in your web app takes a lot of work and time. Our open source tools and cloud services let you build collaborative content editing faster—in days or weeks, rather than months or years. And this is just for the editor. If you want real-time collaboration or other advanced features like version history in your editor, the overall workload quickly escalates—you will need a robust and serious backend infrastructure that requires even more time to set up and maintain. This doesn’t make sense for most frontend developers or most startups.

We spent eight years as a digital agency developing applications with complex content editing functionality. We learned the hard way how limited the existing editors were. After building Tiptap as a headless editor framework with an extension-based architecture, we needed to allow multiple users to edit content simultaneously, which got complicated. There was no simple solution that could be integrated quickly. So we built that too.

The Tiptap editor is based on the JS framework ProseMirror, which is a good foundation for editors. The learning curve for ProseMirror is steep because it's complicated to understand and lacks simple APIs and documentation. It takes a lot of code around ProseMirror to develop a modern user experience. We’ve taken care of that for you.

Tiptap is headless, so it will work with whatever frontend or design you have in mind—we make no assumptions about your UI. You can use it to develop block-based editors like Notion, classic interfaces like Google Docs, or whatever you need. It's also framework agnostic, so you can use it with React, Vue, etc., or vanilla JavaScript. And it's highly customizable through our extension architecture. We also provide an API to access ProseMirror's internals through Tiptap if you want to dig deep into the core.

Adding real-time collaboration to your editor is as easy as installing and configuring an extension. Our collaboration backend, called Hocuspocus, uses Yjs. This is a widely used implementation of CRDTs (conflict- free replicated data type). Hocuspocus makes it easy to set up a Node.js websocket server to handle communication between multiple peers to synchronize data. Like the Tiptap editor, Hocuspocus is designed to be extensible according to your needs. Also, Hocuspocus can work independently of Tiptap with other editors like Lexical or Slate.

An earlier version of Tiptap got discussed a couple years ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26901975. We’ve been enjoying wider adoption since then. For example, Substack uses Tiptap for their editor that allows creators to write content on substack.com, and YC uses Tiptap in their Bookface forum (which is basically HN for YC alums).

With the Tiptap Cloud, we offer managed backend services if you don't want to build and maintain every feature yourself. For real-time collaboration, we provide a cloud infrastructure with multiple datacenter regions where you can deploy Hocuspocus. The Tiptap AI integration beta is a service where you connect your OpenAI API key to our backend and install the Tiptap editor AI extension to get AI writing experience in your editor. Here’s a demo: https://ai-demo.tiptap.dev/

We invite you to explore Tiptap's capabilities in your app, contribute to its open source development, and (hopefully!) join our welcoming community. We'd love to hear what you've already built with Tiptap or what's stopping you from creating something with it :-) We look forward to all of your comments!

Its Release Day: Tiptap Stable Release, Tiptap Collab & Hocuspocus 2.0.0 are out!

We set ourselves some bold goals this year and are delivering with our biggest releases yet.

Tiptap Editor Stable Release

We have released the 2.0.0 stable version of the Tiptap Editor. After 24 months in beta and a challenging last year, we have taken Tiptap to the next level! From now on, semantic versioning applies. The Tiptap editor is now an adult: https://github.com/ueberdosis/tiptap/releases/tag/v2.0.0

Tiptap Collab Release Beta

After six months of work, we finally announce the launch of Tiptap Collab, the Plug'n'Play real-time synchronization and collaboration cloud for your app. It's Hocuspocus on steroids in the cloud: https://tiptap.dev/hocuspocus/server/cloud

All you need is a Tiptap Pro account and a few lines of code in your Tiptap editor, and everything is in sync. No matter what content you've stored in your Tiptap editor.

And guess what? You can use Tiptap Collab with every app! Since Tiptap Collab is based on Yjs, you can use it for every application, as long as you use Yjs. It’s done with a few lines of code in your app.

Hocuspocus 2.0.0 Release

After the stable release in January 2023, Hocuspocus gets its first major version update with the new core feature called “Multiplexing”. Multiplexing allows you to synchronize multiple documents over the same websocket connection. This is especially useful when working with multiple documents at the same time and will make this experience even faster: https://github.com/ueberdosis/hocuspocus/releases/tag/v2.0.0

We are excited to invest even more time and commitment into Tiptap and especially look forward to your contribution!

Tiptap is a product baked by and for the community and will be even more this year.

The home page title has the word zero knowledge, I guess?

Their GitHub has slightly more info regarding this, but I agree that stuff like this should have at least a page dedicated for it that explains how they've implemented their security.

> Notesnook is a free (as in speech) & open-source note-taking app focused on user privacy & ease of use. To ensure zero knowledge principles, Notesnook encrypts everything on your device using XChaCha20-Poly1305 & Argon2.

https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook

Notesnook - Just like EN but Private and Secure

For the last few days I have not been able to log in my account. When I visit via my browser (Chrome) the URL notesnook.com then click on Login top right, it re-directs to the page https://app.notesnook.com/sessionexpired

Notesnook - Private notes app (version 1050634): A fully open source & end-to-end encrypted note taking app

or Notesnook[1], which is also open-source, and E2E. I find it better and more reliable than SN.

[1] https://notesnook.com [2] https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook

We have been using Tiptap in production for more than a year in Notesnook[0]. Glad to see it finally launching here on HN!

We have had quite a long and rough ride in search of a stable rich text editor. We began with Quill.js then migrated to TinyMCE and then finally settled on Prosemirror. Unfortunately, contenteditable is still absolutely horrible on web browsers, especially mobile ones.

Tiptap is a good choice if you are looking for a framework agnostic and thin abstraction over Prosemirror. However, if you are primarily working with React you should go with Remirror[1]. Tiptap's APIs are heavily inspired by Remirror (almost a duplicate in some places). Remirror takes the edge on the maturity and stability of the API and extensions. The sheer number of utilities offered by them to simplify Prosemirror's APIs is astounding.

In the end, though, its Prosemirror that's doing all the heavy lifting. And no matter how many abstractions you put on it, you will have to get really, really close in with Prosemirror's internals. Tiptap or Remirror do not make that any easier or harder aside from the initial bootstrapping.

[0] https://notesnook.com

[1] https://remirror.io

Perhaps poster was thinking of https://notesnook.com?

Their pitch is as a privacy focused notes manager.

Even though Evernote is a competitor, it's still sad to see such a giant in the note-taking space go down so badly. Of course, I am still skeptical about this news and whether its actually true since no source has been linked.

Aside:

I work (and lead the development) on Notesnook, an end-to-end encrypted, open source alternative to Evernote. Since we are based in Pakistan, our pricing has been really competitive at just $4.49/mo (compared to $17.99/mo of Evernote). And best of all, we have one of the best Evernote Importers around: https://importer.notesnook.com/

If you'd like to learn more about Notesnook: https://notesnook.com/

Feel free to ask me any and all questions!