tiptap VS slate

Hey HN, Philip here, Co-founder at Tiptap (https://tiptap.dev/).

We just shipped an upgrade to our DOCX import and export capabilities, including new extensions, new endpoints, better formatting handling, and custom node support. This may be for you if your product deals with Microsoft Word files in any way.

We rebuilt our DOCX handling pipeline to give developers more control and flexibility:

- Import endpoint: Converts .docx to Tiptap JSON, accurately handles complex formatting (lists, tables, inline styles).

- Export extension: Generates .docx from your editor content, including custom nodes.

- Custom node support: Map internal components (e.g. callouts, embeds) to standard DOCX structures.

- Style control: Define exactly how DOCX output should look to match your app’s UI.

- Frontend or backend: Run conversion wherever it makes sense for your setup.

- Image upload handling: We give you hooks to manage storage your way.

What's still on the roadmap:

1) Import and export of DOCX headers and footers

2) Import and export DOCX pagination

3) Import and export comments, version history, and suggestions

Developer Docs: https://tiptap.dev/docs/conversion/import-export/docx

Product Website: https://tiptap.dev/product/conversion

We’d love your feedback! If you’ve struggled with document conversion (or just want to nerd out a bit), let us know your thoughts and experiences.

Show HN: Tiptap Editor 3.0 Beta is out.

Hi HN! Philip here from Tiptap (https://tiptap.dev/). We're excited to announce Tiptap 3.0 Beta, a major upgrade built with and for the open source community. It's still extension-based, still unopinionated, but we've tackled some of the biggest developer headaches:

Enhanced TypeScript support:

Hi, Philip here from Tiptap. We just released a new set of open source UI components for [Tiptap](https://tiptap.dev/), our headless text editor framework.

These are handcrafted React components that integrate directly with Tiptap’s headless core, things like toolbars, dropdowns, formatting buttons, upload controls, etc. They’re MIT licensed and fully optional. You can use them as-is or customize every part.

There’s also a CLI that sets everything up for you: project scaffolding, recommended defaults, and a working example.

This is for folks who like the flexibility of Tiptap but don’t want to start from zero every time they need an editor UI. It doesn’t change how Tiptap works – just gives you a faster way to build on top of it.

Start here:

Thanks! I built the editor using Tiptap (https://tiptap.dev/) which doesn't support Markdown out of the box. However, since it can detect Markdown shortcuts (#, ##, >, etc.), it should be possible to convert a markdown file into rich text, and then when done writing and editing convert it back into markdown, while limiting formatting options only to ones that are available for both. I think Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/) does something similar.

I'll think about this for sure, especially since I've been thinking of making it possible to save and read local files. If you'd like to try Gorby, send me an email and I'll be happy to give you a free license code :)

While Storyblok and Builder.io offer full-page editing experiences with structured CMS capabilities, Tiptap takes a different approach. It’s not a traditional page builder but rather an embeddable headless editor built on ProseMirror. This means that instead of giving you a predefined UI to work with, it provides the underlying logic, leaving you in full control of the interface, interaction and level of functionality you want to provide in your page builder.

There are paid tools available. For example, the Tiptap rich text editor is free to use, but some advanced features and APIs are paid for. For example, the cursor editor heavily relies on AI capabilities, so it requires payment for use.

Novel is an open-source Notion-style WYSIWYG editor with AI-powered autocompletion. This built on top of TipTap. Tiptap is the headless and open source editor framework. Integrate over 100+ extensions and paid features like collaboration and AI agents to create the UX you want.

For more, visit the official TipTap website. Did you learn something new from this article? Let me know in the comments! 🎉

Tip Tap Library

However, I had difficulties inserting editable BLOCKS with syntax highlighting for code. Yes, there is an official example, but at least for me, it's not very clear.

This work looks very promising. "HTML for email" is indeed hard to design and hard to implement. Especially editing on mobile, table decices, or Asian language input nightmare.

I do lot of email templating for B2B CRM use cases and decided to opt out for a bit different approach based on slatejs/platejs editor

https://docs.slatejs.org/

https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate

https://github.com/udecode/plate

The internal representation of slatejs/platejs is json format. Ex:

{

- it creates a layout based on rows and cells, so it support multi-column layout - each cell can contain a different "cell-plugin", - richt-text editor based on https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate is built in and comes with its own plugin system. It can do weight, italic, block-types, alignment and lists and can be extended as you want (even with elements storing data and interactive components) - you can create custom cell plugins based on a schema (or custom control ui) and a component that should be rendered - it stores an object tree that represent it, not html. It therefore can contain any react component, which is great if you want to allow your editors to add interactive components or components that you already built as part of the app - i carefully optimized for SSR and bundle size, so no editor ui is rendered nor loaded. editor ui is only loaded on the client if you disable readOnly. (lazy loading) - it mainly tested with nextjs, since i used it for content-heavy pages. - its not yet tested with react-server components, but it should actually work in read-only mode

Finally there's Slate and Lexical which are super powerful in terms of customizability and extensibility. They're great options for when the editing experience plays a major role in the product.

Slate, as per its documentation, is a completely customizable framework for building rich text editors. Therefore, it doesn't offer a feature-rich text editor but instead provides tools to build one. Let's create a component called Slate and see what the Slate editor looks like.

Link to Repo

Word of warning about Slate: I love the API and the design goals, but it appears to suffer from some fundamental issues. We were experiencing issues similar to this one and a team of multiple 10+ year experienced frontend devs couildn't figure out what was going on. I had to completely rip out a feature we had built with Slate and had to reimplement a new version from scratch with Lexical. So far we have no issues other than those inherent to rich text editing.

We're trying to choose between Lexical and Slate at work. Do you have any examples that would be similar to this? https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/blob/main/site/examp...

If you are going to customise a ton of functionalities and/or implement new functionality I suggest using SlateJS. If not, have a look at Sun editor.