When you're adding text editing to your app, you need a rich text editor for React that balances features with performance. The options range from minimal WYSIWYG libraries to full frameworks with plugin systems. Some editors are framework-agnostic, others are built for React or Vue. We're walking through the top 10 rich text editors in 2026, covering what each one does well and where it falls short, so you can choose based on your actual requirements instead of guessing.

TLDR:

• Rich text editors range from headless frameworks like Lexical and TipTap to complete solutions like TinyMCE

• Lexical and TipTap offer the most flexibility for custom implementations in React apps

• Code-focused editors like Monaco and CodeMirror handle syntax highlighting better than traditional rich text editors

• Velt adds real-time collaboration features to any React editor through DOM-aware comment binding and Yjs infrastructure

What Is a Rich Text Editor and Why It Matters

A rich text editor is a text input component that lets users format content directly in the browser. Unlike plain text fields, these editors provide formatting controls for bold, italics, headings, lists, images, links, and tables. For developers building web apps, rich text editors solve a critical problem: users expect formatting capabilities without leaving your interface. Whether you're building a content management system, project management tool, or collaborative workspace, a rich text editor becomes the bridge between simple text input and full document creation. And if you don't believe us, just consider that according to CKEditor's 2024 report, 71% of respondents consider rich text editors critical to their apps.

Today's rich text editors range from lightweight WYSIWYG libraries to extensible frameworks that support custom nodes, real-time collaboration, and advanced formatting. Some are headless (you build the UI), while others provide complete interfaces out of the box. The choice depends on your app's complexity, your team's resources, and whether you need features like mentions, commenting, or multiplayer editing. Framework-based editors like Lexical give you architectural control but require more setup while drop-in solutions like TinyMCE get you up-and-running faster but offer less customization.

Key Factors to Consider When Choosing a Rich Text Editor

Choosing a rich text editor means balancing control, performance, and features. 52% of developers want full control over their editor's experience.

Here's what to consider:

• Framework compatibility: Verify native support for React, Vue, or Angular. Some editors offer framework-agnostic APIs, while others provide dedicated wrapper components.

• Customization depth: Decide between headless frameworks (you build the UI) and pre-built interfaces. Headless gives you full design control but requires more engineering.

• Bundle size and performance: Check the minified size and rendering speed, especially for mobile users or content-heavy pages.

• Collaborative features: If you need real-time editing, comments, or presence, confirm whether the editor supports these natively or requires third-party integration.

• Licensing: Review whether the editor is open-source (MIT, GPL) or requires commercial licensing for production use.

Lexical: Meta's Extensible Text Editor Framework

Lexical is Meta's text editor framework, powering Facebook, WhatsApp, and other Meta products. Unlike monolithic editors, Lexical provides a minimal core with a plugin architecture that lets you build the editor you need. The framework is framework-agnostic but includes official React bindings. Its plugin system handles mentions, hashtags, custom node types, and toolbar controls. You compose features instead of stripping out unwanted functionality. And, performance is a priority. Lexical uses an immutable state model and efficient reconciliation to handle large documents without lag. It meets WCAG standards with proper ARIA labels and keyboard navigation.

The lexical-playground provides a live testing environment to experiment with plugins and review implementation patterns before building your own editor. This makes Lexical ideal for teams that need flexibility and control with reliability from a framework used at scale.

TipTap: The Headless Rich Text Editor Built on ProseMirror

TipTap is a headless rich text editor built on ProseMirror. The framework provides editor logic and state management without imposing a UI, letting you design every button, menu, and interaction. Its headless approach makes TipTap a strong choice for teams building Notion-style editors or custom content creation interfaces. You control markup, styling, and behavior while TipTap handles the document model.

The extension system is extensive. TipTap ships with pre-built extensions for formatting, lists, tables, code blocks, and mentions. You can write custom extensions to handle domain-specific content types or behaviors. Each extension is composable, so you add only what you need.

Real-time collaboration comes through Yjs integration. TipTap supports multiplayer editing with conflict-free merging, making it viable for collaborative app development. You'll need to configure Yjs infrastructure and connection handling separately.

With over 1.8 million monthly npm downloads, TipTap ranks among the most popular editor frameworks. Its TypeScript support, active community, and clear documentation reduce integration friction.

Quill: The Powerful and Lightweight WYSIWYG Editor

Quill is a WYSIWYG editor maintained by Slab that focuses on simplicity and extensibility. Its modular architecture lets you add or remove formatting options through a clean API. The editor uses a JSON-based delta format to represent document changes, making it straightforward to save, version, and sync content. Quill handles the conversion between user actions and delta operations automatically. Theming is built into the core with two options: Snow (toolbar-based) and Bubble (Medium-style tooltip). You can customize either or build your own using CSS variables and the module system.

React integration works through react-quill, a wrapper that exposes Quill's API as React props. The integration supports both controlled and uncontrolled component patterns. With 1,482,043 weekly downloads, Quill is one of the most deployed rich text editors. Its stability and documentation make it a reliable choice when you need solid formatting functionality.

SlateJS: The Completely Customizable React Framework

SlateJS is a React framework that treats the editor as a customizable primitive. Its schema-less core uses a nested document model similar to the DOM, giving you control over every node, operation, and rendering decision. The plugin architecture is unrestricted. You define custom block types, inline elements, and editing behaviors without working around library constraints. This makes Slate viable for specialized use cases like legal document markup, medical records, or technical specification editors where standard WYSIWYG patterns don't fit.

Slate is currently in beta and maintained by contributors instead of a commercial entity. The API surface has evolved across major versions, which means migration effort when updating. This positioning makes it best suited for teams with deep React expertise who need complete control and can manage framework-level decisions.

BlockNote: Block-Based Editor for React Applications

BlockNote brings Notion-style editing to React apps with a block-first architecture. Each piece of content (paragraph, heading, image, table) exists as an independent block that users can manipulate, drag, and transform. The slash command interface lets users insert blocks by typing "/" and selecting from a menu. This pattern reduces toolbar clutter and speeds up content creation for users familiar with Notion. TypeScript support is native, with full type definitions for the editor API and custom block creation. You can extend BlockNote by defining new block types with their own schemas, rendering logic, and conversion rules.

BlockNote handles block manipulation logic, keyboard shortcuts, and drag-and-drop reordering out of the box, making it faster to ship compared to building block functionality from scratch in SlateJS or Lexical.

Plate: The Plugin System for Building Rich Text Editors

Plate is a plugin system built on top of SlateJS that reduces the implementation overhead of Slate's flexible architecture. It provides pre-built plugins for common formatting needs like headings, lists, tables, mentions, and code blocks, along with UI components that work out of the box.

The plugin ecosystem includes over 30 official plugins that handle the complexity Slate leaves to developers. Each plugin is composable, letting you assemble exactly the feature set you need without unnecessary dependencies. TypeScript support is full, with type safety across the plugin API and custom node definitions.

TinyMCE: The Enterprise-Grade WYSIWYG Editor

TinyMCE is a commercial WYSIWYG editor with a free core and over 50 plugins. More than 1.5 million developers use it globally. The editor includes AI-powered content generation, automated formatting, and cloud-based media management. Premium plugins add advanced tables, spell checking, and accessibility checking.

TinyMCE works with React, Angular, and Vue through official integrations. Enterprise customers get dedicated support, SLAs, and priority bug fixes. The licensing model splits functionality between open-source core features and paid premium plugins.

CodeMirror: The Code Editor for Technical Content

CodeMirror is a code editor built for embedding syntax-highlighted code editing into web apps. It works as a rich text solution for technical content requiring syntax highlighting and code formatting. The editor supports over 100 programming languages with tokenization, bracket matching, and code folding. Its incremental parsing handles large documents without the performance issues common in DOM-heavy rich text editors. CodeMirror's extension system lets you add custom language modes, linters, and editing behaviors. The architecture separates editor state from the view layer, providing for predictable updates and straightforward testing.

For apps that blend prose with code (documentation tools, technical wikis, developer notebooks), CodeMirror provides stronger code editing capabilities than traditional rich text editors while maintaining text formatting features.

Monaco Editor: VS Code's Editor Technology

Monaco Editor powers Visual Studio Code and brings the same editing experience to web apps. Microsoft maintains the project with support for IntelliSense, syntax highlighting, and diff viewing built into the core. The editor handles over 60 languages with intelligent code completion, parameter hints, and error detection. Its diff editor lets users compare versions side-by-side for code review interfaces and version control features. Monaco meets accessibility standards with full keyboard navigation and screen reader support. Integration requires more setup than lighter-weight editors due to its worker-based architecture and larger bundle size.

For developer tools like online IDEs, code playgrounds, or notebook interfaces, Monaco delivers the full code editing experience developers expect from desktop editors.

Ace Editor: The High Performance Code Editor

Ace Editor is a standalone code editor built for performance with a smaller footprint than Monaco Editor. Originally developed for Cloud9 IDE, it supports syntax highlighting for over 110 languages. The editor includes multiple themes, configurable keybindings (Vim, Emacs, Sublime Text), and code folding. Its modular design lets you load only the language modes and features you need, keeping bundle sizes minimal. Framework integration works through wrapper libraries like react-ace. Ace handles rendering and input management while exposing a straightforward API for reading and updating content programmatically.

Ace works well for embedded code snippets, configuration editors, or lightweight scripting interfaces where code editing is secondary to your main workflow.

CKEditor 5: The Collaborative Editing Solution

CKEditor 5 is a modular rich text editor built for collaborative document editing. The editor supports real-time multiplayer editing with track changes, comments, and revision history. The custom data model separates content structure from presentation, which allows consistent rendering across output formats. The plugin architecture lets you configure formatting options and editing behaviors through a builder interface. Premium features include AI-powered writing assistance and export to Word and PDF. Commercial licensing provides enterprise support and SLAs.

CKEditor works well for apps needing document-grade editing with pre-built collaboration features.

Side-By-Side Comparison of Text Editors

Adding Real-Time Collaboration to Your Rich Text Editor with Velt

Now that you have a lay-of-the-land regarding rich text and code editors, let's talk about integrating real-time collaboration with those editors. Most rich text editors handle formatting and content structure well, but adding collaboration features like contextual comments, live cursors, presence indicators, and notifications typically requires months of development work.

Velt provides a collaboration layer that works alongside any React-based rich text editor. The SDK integrates with Lexical, TipTap, Quill, SlateJS, and other editors to add comments, real-time presence, notifications, and recording features without rebuilding your editor. Initialize Velt in your app, then add collaboration components where you need them using React components that layer on top of your existing editor. Let's take a look at how Velt improves upon standard commenting systems as well as extending collaboration in a number of powerful ways:

• DOM-aware comment location binding

• Recursive hierarchy for document relationships

• Real-time synchronization infrastructure

DOM-Aware Comment Location Binding

Standard commenting systems rely on x/y coordinates or custom positioning logic that breaks when your UI updates. Velt's commenting uses DOM-aware location binding, which attaches comments to specific data IDs instead of pixel positions. When you bind a comment thread to a document element, Velt tracks that relationship through layout changes, window resizes, and content updates.

For rich text editors with complex document structures like nested blocks, dynamic content, or embedded media, this location binding works with your existing data model by mapping document IDs to Velt's location API.

Recursive Hierarchy for Document Relationships

Velt organizes collaboration data as Organization → Folder → Document → Location. This structure means features like unified notifications, cross-document activity feeds, and permission inheritance work without custom aggregation logic. Users see all collaboration activity across your app in a single inbox instead of checking individual documents. This model eliminates the glue code typical of room-based collaboration infrastructure, removing the need to write recursive queries to fetch comments across folder structures or build permission cascading logic manually.

Real-Time Synchronization Infrastructure

Velt uses Yjs and WebSockets to handle real-time synchronization and conflict-free merging when multiple users edit simultaneously.

Final Thoughts on Finding Your Rich Text Editor

The right rich text editor for React depends on your customization needs and development timeline. Frameworks like Lexical and SlateJS offer complete control but need more engineering effort, while Quill and TinyMCE provide ready-made interfaces. Adding collaboration features like comments and presence becomes straightforward with Velt, which works alongside any React-based editor. Pick what fits your team's skills and project scope.

FAQ

What's the difference between a headless editor and a WYSIWYG editor?

Headless editors like TipTap and Lexical provide the editor logic and state management but leave the UI implementation to you, giving full design control. WYSIWYG editors like TinyMCE and Quill include pre-built interfaces that work immediately but offer less customization flexibility.

Which rich text editor works best with React 19?

Lexical and TipTap both offer native React support with TypeScript definitions and work well with React 19. Lexical provides official React bindings from Meta, while TipTap's headless architecture integrates cleanly with React's component model.

How do I add real-time collaboration to an existing rich text editor?

Most editors don't include collaboration features natively, requiring months of custom development. Velt's SDK layers on top of React-based editors like Lexical, TipTap, or Quill to add comments, presence, and notifications without rebuilding your editor infrastructure.

When should I choose a code editor over a rich text editor?

Use code editors like Monaco or CodeMirror when your app needs syntax highlighting, code completion, or diff viewing for technical content. Rich text editors work better for document creation, content management, or general text formatting needs.

What's the typical bundle size impact of adding a rich text editor?

Lightweight editors like Quill add around 100KB minified, while feature-rich options like Monaco can exceed 2MB. Headless frameworks like Lexical and TipTap let you load only the plugins you need, keeping bundle sizes smaller for performance-sensitive apps.