If you're researching commenting SDKs and real-time collaboration tools, you've probably come across Liveblocks, Tiptap, and definitely Velt.

TLDR:

• Liveblocks provides basic backend infrastructure for real-time apps but requires major frontend development

• Tiptap Collaboration is only for on rich text editor collaboration with document-based pricing

• Liveblocks offers more flexibility but demands more technical implementation time

• Tiptap is limited to their own editor, while Liveblocks works across different app types

• Velt is a plug-and-play commenting SDK that is the best of both worlds with 25+ collaboration features.

Understanding Liveblocks: Backend Infrastructure for Real-Time Apps

Liveblocks positions itself as the collaboration infrastructure platform for building real-time applications. They focus on providing strong backend services that let you build multiplayer features, real-time syncing, and collaborative experiences.

Liveblocks handles the complex backend infrastructure needed for real-time collaboration, including conflict resolution, data synchronization, and user presence management.

However, here's the catch: Liveblocks primarily focuses on backend infrastructure. You'll still need to build most of your frontend UI from scratch. This means a lot of development time for features like comment threads, user avatars, notification systems, and interactive elements.

While Liveblocks provides solid backend infrastructure, teams often underestimate the overall development required to create complete polished collaboration experiences and workflows.

For teams with dedicated engineering, pm and design resources dedicated to collaboration roadmap, this approach offers flexibility. But if you're looking for a faster path to market, you might want to consider solutions that provide both frontend and backend components in one package.

Our Liveblocks SDK review goes deeper into the technical implementation requirements and alternatives worth considering.

Tiptap Collaboration

Tiptap Collaboration takes a different approach by focusing on rich text editor collaboration. Their solution lets you do real-time collaborative editing for multiple users working simultaneously using Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) powered by Yjs.

The platform shines in document-heavy applications where all you need is rich text editing in Tiptap editors only. Tiptap's collaboration features include real-time synchronization, user presence with avatars and cursors, and offline content support.

Their pricing model reflects this document-focused approach. Plans start at $49/month for 500 documents, scale to $149/month for 5,000 documents, and reach $999/month for 50,000 documents. This document-based pricing can be predictable for teams with clear document volume projections. The limitation? Tiptap Collaboration only works with TipTap editors. If your app needs collaboration features beyond document editing, like commenting on dashboards, design tools, or data visualizations, you'll need a different vendor. If you don't use Tiptap under the hood, you can't use them either.

We've seen teams like HeyGen, Alayna, etc. successfully implement commenting in Tiptap editors by combining Tiptap with the Velt collaboration SDKs. This hybrid approach gives you the best of both worlds: Tiptap's excellent text editing with complete collaboration features across your entire application.

The Developer Experience: Implementation Complexity Compared

Let's talk about what actually happens when you try to implement these solutions. The developer experience varies a lot between platforms.

When using Yjs with editors, you still need a backend service to store documents and allow real-time collaboration. Liveblocks provides a general Yjs backend that works with any editor supporting Yjs, which is elegant from an architecture standpoint.

But here's where things get complex. You'll need to handle user authentication, build comment UI components, create notification systems, manage user permissions, and integrate everything with your existing app architecture. We're talking about weeks or months of development time.

Tiptap's approach is more focused but still requires major integration work. You'll need to set up their collaboration backend called Hocuspocus, configure user management, and build supporting features like comments and notifications separately. The reality is that most teams need a solution where a single engineer can add comments and collaboration features in just a few minutes without extensive help from Product or Design teams. That's where the "10 lines of code vs 1000s of lines" difference becomes key for shipping speed.

Our implementation comparison shows real examples of code complexity across different collaboration SDKs, and the differences are pretty dramatic.

Feature Set Analysis: What Each Platform Offers

Here's where the platforms really set themselves apart in terms of what you get out of the box.

Liveblocks focuses on core collaboration infrastructure: real-time data synchronization, user presence, and storage. They provide solid building blocks for adding collaboration to Tiptap text editors, including document storage, version history, and integration capabilities with comments and notifications systems.

Tiptap Collaboration offers real-time editing features, user presence with avatars and cursors, offline content support, and document synchronization. Their feature set is complete within the text editing domain.

The feature gap shows up when you need complete collaboration tools. While both platforms handle their core competencies well, teams often need additional features like live huddles, video recording, AI transcription, contextual commenting, and robust notification systems.

This is where platforms like Velt with 25+ premium features start to make sense. Instead of cobbling together multiple solutions, you get everything from basic commenting to advanced collaboration tools in one integrated package. Check out our best commenting SDK comparison for a detailed feature breakdown.

Scalability and Performance Considerations

Scalability is where infrastructure choices really matter. Liveblocks provides reliable WebSocket infrastructure built to handle traffic on collaborative experiences and scale to 100s of thousands of users. Their architecture is designed for high-performance real-time applications.

Tiptap's scalability depends on your hosting choice and document complexity. Their collaboration features can handle substantial concurrent users, but performance varies based on document size and editing complexity.

However, there's a big difference in what "scalability" means for your specific use case. Base plan limitations can be a real constraint:

• Traditional collaboration SDKs often limit you to around 100K comments and 8GB of storage. Their prices increase dramatically once your needs grow beyond 8GB

• Velt is best in class with 200M comments and 2,000GB in their base plans

• The difference becomes important as your user base grows. Beyond raw numbers, consider how well it can scale. How much engineering time will you spend maintaining and optimizing your collaboration infrastructure? How quickly can you add new collaboration features as user needs evolve?

Our pricing page breaks down not just the costs but the scalability implications of different approaches to collaboration infrastructure.

Security and Compliance: Enterprise Readiness

Enterprise customers have specific security and compliance requirements that not all collaboration platforms can meet.

Tiptap offers self-hosted and on-premise deployment options for organizations requiring full control over data and infrastructure. They provide various hosting options including dedicated cloud servers, which gives enterprises the control they need for sensitive data.

Liveblocks provides basic security features appropriate for business applications, but enterprise-specific compliance requirements may need additional consideration.

For teams dealing with healthcare, financial, or other controlled industries, compliance isn't optional. You need SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA compliance, GDPR compliance, and the ability to self-host data when required.

The security environment also includes regular penetration testing, audit trails, and granular access controls. These are incredibly important requirements that affect how you can deploy and maintain your collaboration features.

Our security page and trust center details the compliance standards that enterprise customers actually need, not just the basics that most platforms provide.

Pricing Models: Understanding the Total Cost of Ownership

Pricing models reveal a lot about how platforms expect you to use their services. Tiptap recently shifted to billing based on paid features used and the number of documents stored in Tiptap Cloud. This document-centric pricing works well if your collaboration needs align with document creation and editing.

Liveblocks typically charges based on monthly active users and data transfer, which can be predictable for some use cases but may scale unexpectedly with heavy app usage.

But here's what most teams miss: the total cost of ownership includes development time, maintenance, and feature expansion costs. A "cheaper" solution that requires months of development and ongoing maintenance may cost much more than a complete platform with higher upfront pricing. Consider these hidden costs:

• Frontend development time for UI components

• Backend integration and maintenance

• Additional tools for features not included in your primary platform

• Engineering time for updates and feature additions

The most cost-effective approach often involves platforms that provide both frontend SDK and backend APIs in one package, eliminating the need to coordinate multiple vendors and integration points.

The Velt Alternative: Best of Both Worlds

The Velt SDK lets developers add collaboration features ridiculously fast. We've distilled the best collaboration features from Figma, Google Docs, Loom, and Slack into modular components that work across different types of applications.

Instead of choosing between backend flexibility and frontend completeness, you get both. Instead of implementing basic features and building advanced ones yourself, you get 25+ premium features out of the box.

The platform includes everything from basic commenting and real-time presence to advanced features like live video huddles, screen recording with AI transcription, and contextual collaboration tools that work across different types of interfaces.

We support all major frameworks, and are framework agnostic with our vanilla JS library. And our customization options let you maintain your brand and user experience while getting enterprise-grade collaboration infrastructure.

Migration Considerations and Implementation Timeline

If you're considering switching between collaboration platforms, implementation timeline becomes a key factor. Teams have shipped comments in just a week with complete SDKs compared to months of development with infrastructure-only solutions.

Migration complexity varies greatly:

• Moving from one infrastructure platform to another requires rebuilding UI components

• Switching from editor-specific solutions to broader platforms opens up new collaboration possibilities

• Full-featured platforms often provide migration tools and support to ease transitions The key consideration is opportunity cost. Every month spent building collaboration features is a month not spent on your core product differentiation. Every engineering cycle dedicated to maintaining collaboration infrastructure is a cycle not available for customer-requested features.

We've created specific migration guides, including our Liveblocks to Velt migration resource, because we've seen teams successfully make these transitions when the business case is clear.

Our examples gallery shows implementation patterns across different frameworks and use cases, giving you a realistic sense of what's involved in getting collaboration features live in your application.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use Liveblocks with Tiptap for the best of both worlds?

Yes, you can combine Liveblocks' backend infrastructure with Tiptap's editor for collaborative text editing. However, you'll still need to build additional UI components for features like comments, notifications, and user management. This approach gives you flexibility but requires more development time.

Which solution offers the fastest implementation for basic commenting features?

Velt's collaboration SDKs typically offer the fastest path to commenting, often requiring just 10-15 lines of code. Infrastructure-focused solutions like Liveblocks require building the comment UI yourself, while editor-specific solutions like Tiptap work well for document commenting but may not cover other parts of your application.

How do pricing models compare for a growing startup?

Document-based pricing (like Tiptap) works well if your growth matches document creation. User-based pricing (like Liveblocks) scales with your user base.

What about self-hosting and compliance requirements?

Both Tiptap and Velt offer self-hosting options for compliance-sensitive customers. Liveblocks does not. For enterprise customers, look for SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance, plus the ability to host data in your own cloud.

Making the Right Choice for Your 2025 Collaboration Needs

The collaboration SDK space offers different solutions for different needs, but the choice often comes down to how you want to spend your engineering resources.

Liveblocks provides solid backend infrastructure with the flexibility to build realtime collaboration experiences. It's a good choice for teams with dedicated engineering resources for collaboration roadmap.

Tiptap Collaboration excels in rich text editing scenarios and offers a focused solution for document-heavy applications. Their specialized approach works well when text editing is your primary collaboration need.

But most teams we talk to are looking for something different. They want full collaboration features that work across their entire application. They need solutions that balance powerful functionality with implementation speed. The reality is that developers seeking commenting SDKs and real-time collaboration want solutions that let them ship features fast without sacrificing quality or scalability. They want the infrastructure reliability of platforms like Liveblocks, the ease of integration they'd expect from focused solutions like Tiptap, plus many more features to meet evolving user expectations.

Whether you're adding comments to a dashboard, letting teams work together in a design tool, or building the next generation of collaborative applications, you shouldn't have to choose between speed and functionality. If you want to check out full-suite of collaboration features out, we'd love to chat.