Let’s be real — rich text editors are usually a pain. They're either too rigid, too bloated, or mysteriously allergic to custom styles. But then along came Tiptap, and suddenly writing, editing, and customizing felt... kind of fun? Yeah, we didn’t believe it at first either.

Tiptap is built on top of the ProseMirror toolkit, but it abstracts away all the messy bits. In other words, you get ProseMirror’s rock-solid foundation without the headache. It’s a developer-friendly, headless framework that lets you assemble exactly the editor features you need.

What makes Tiptap special?

Tiptap really shines because it puts developers in control. For starters, it’s completely headless and framework-agnostic: you can plug Tiptap into any JS app (React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, Vanilla JS, you name it) and wire up your own UI.

There are also ready-made React and Vue components and templates if you want to get started fast (and you can always swap them out or style them how you like).

It’s also modular and lightweight by design. Tiptap uses an extension-based system, so you add only the features you need. Need bold and italics? Pop in the StarterKit. Want tables or diagrams? There are extensions for that too.

Tiptap has a library of 100+ core and paid extensions, and you can even write your own custom nodes, marks, or commands. Because of this, your bundle stays lean — in fact, its core is often smaller than Quill, Slate, and Lexical thanks to tree-shaking.

Here’s a quick rundown of what makes developers love it:

• Headless & Flexible: Since Tiptap is headless, it doesn’t force any UI or styles on you. You build and style your own interface.
• Framework-Agnostic: Use it with React, Vue, Svelte, Vanilla JS, etc.
• Developer-Friendly: Written in TypeScript, great autocompletion, and fully typed.
• ProseMirror Power: It inherits stability, performance, and collaboration from its underlying engine.
• MIT Licensed: Core functionality is open-source and production ready.
• Rich Extension Ecosystem: Tables, code blocks, math, mentions, images — all optional and extendable.

How Tiptap Stacks Up (vs. the Rest)

Let’s see how Tiptap compares to other popular editors:

CKEditor / TinyMCE

These are mature WYSIWYG editors with built-in toolbars, which are great for non-devs. But they’re often heavy and hard to customize. You usually end up fighting their styles and defaults.

Tiptap, on the other hand, gives you a blank canvas — no styles, no locked-in UI, just an editor engine you fully control.

Quill

Quill is lightweight and easy for basic formatting, but it’s not very flexible. Custom formats or advanced features require deeper workarounds, and development on it has slowed down. Tiptap gives you more power and better docs, and is actively maintained.

Slate

Slate is very flexible — maybe too flexible. You end up building almost everything from scratch, and its learning curve is steeper. Tiptap saves time with great defaults while still letting you override and customize everything.

Lexical

Meta’s new editor framework is fast and accessible, but it’s React-focused and not as extensible (yet) as Tiptap. Tiptap supports more frameworks, has a larger extension library, and works well outside of React too.

Draft.js / React-Quill

Draft.js is deprecated. React-Quill wraps Quill, but again, it’s hard to customize. Many teams switching from Draft or Quill now prefer Tiptap for its DX.

The Bottom Line

If you’ve ever felt like you had to hack your way around a rich text editor, you’re not alone. Tiptap changes the game by putting developers first. Whether you want basic formatting or advanced custom blocks, it lets you build exactly what your app needs — no more, no less.

It’s fast, flexible, typed, open-source, and actually pleasant to work with.

Tiptap is the rich text editor you didn’t know you needed — until now.