How to Discern Level of Effort to Integrate Collaboration in a Rich Text Editor

When your team decides to add collaboration features into your app, one of the first technical questions that comes up is: what level of effort (LOE) does this work require? More specifically, what’s the specific level of effort needed to integrate a rich text editor (RTE) that actually supports comments, tracking changes, mentions, document history, and multiple users co-editing the same content?

At first glance, integration might look like installing an RTE with a few lines of code. But seasoned teams know that’s just the surface. Below that code lies a series of architectural, backend, and UX decisions that can balloon a “simple” integration into a multi-sprint project.

This guide is the last in a series of guides on adding collaboration features to your RTE. If you’re interested in specific comparisons, check out the other articles in the series: 

• Collaboration Features in Rich Text Editors - Comparison Guide 
• Comparing Implementing Collaboration: TinyMCE & CKEditor
• Comparing Implementing Collaboration: TinyMCE & Froala
• Comparing Implementing Collaboration: TinyMCE & Tiptap 

This guide helps you identify the nuanced complexity in collaboration features so you can accurately scope integration work and avoid costly underestimates.

How to determine the true level of effort for your team

Before your team starts planning, step back and ask: What does “effort” actually mean in your context and for your team? Level of effort looks different for every team, and for different reasons. It’s not just dev hours. 

Level of effort is the aggregate of technical unknowns, backend requirements, stakeholder demands, and organizational coordination. And all of that must be assessed in order to ship and maintain a rich collaboration experience in your app.

To assess LOE for integrating collaboration features in your RTE accurately, use these six filters:

1. Feature depth: Start by listing out the features your requirements ask for and your users need. Are you implementing suggested edits? Or do you need inline comments, mentions, revision history, and role-based permissions? The more interactive and collaborative your editor needs to be, the more effort you’ll need to spend wiring up supporting logic, data models, and workflows. 
2. Architecture compatibility: How well does the RTE’s structure align with your app’s current stack? Editors like TinyMCE and CKEditor offer native plugins that reduce the glue code you need to write. Headless options like Tiptap offer flexibility but shift more responsibility to your devs. Evaluate if your app needs to manage state synchronization, event coordination, or real-time logic.
3. Integration surface area: Count the touchpoints your team has to work on: backend APIs, user auth systems, content storage, analytics hooks. Every integration point is a potential blocker or maintenance cost. For example, implementing comments in multiple RTEs means configuring a half dozen (or more, in some cases) custom endpoints for individual comment actions.
4. Customization requirements: Outline the customization that will need to be done to make the RTE visually compatible with your app, match your branding, and provide an intuitive user experience (UX). Will your editor need to match a custom design system? Does it need mobile optimization or accessibility enhancements? Any visual or interaction-level deviation from default behavior increases the testing and tuning effort.
5. Team expertise and support: Has your team worked with this editor before? Are there docs, support channels, or community examples available? An unfamiliar RTE—or one with fragmented support—can double your delivery time. Prioritize vendors with strong documentation and support responsiveness.
6. Hidden costs: Beyond all of the above, there are always hidden costs while any team is developing an app. Hidden costs typically come from unforeseen requirements that were necessary from the start, user behavior, or security non-negotiables. 

All six of these categories are, frankly, a lot to factor in to determine your level of effort. In previous parts of this series, the metric used t-shirt sizes Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large. These estimates are made to include everything needed to deliver production-ready collaboration features in your RTE: development, QA, documentation, integrations, and deployment. Of course, the actual time can vary.

These sizes are based on a team of three developers and break down roughly as follows:

• Small: Around one week of work, or half a sprint.
• Medium: About two weeks, or a full sprint.
• Large: Approximately four weeks, or two sprints.
• Extra Large: Roughly six to eight weeks, or three to four sprints.

Why the effort for adding collaboration features to your RTE is easy to underestimate

That initial install command feels deceptively satisfying. But the real work to integrate collaboration features into your RTE is invisible until your team is in the thick of it: backend wiring, user identity mapping, plugin coordination, content versioning, accessibility, and responsive UX.

You must account not just for the base integration, but also the long tail of complexity. What starts as a developer story to "add rich text editing" becomes a broader project involving backend engineers, product managers, and possibly UX designers. It’s easier to believe that importing a few other libraries will answer all your requirements than to take a look at the overwhelming evidence of intricate complexity. 

Native features vs. stitched-together solutions

Not all RTEs approach collaboration the same way. Some offer native, integrated plugins that work together. Others expect you to assemble extensions, third-party tools, or REST APIs. 

Take TinyMCE and CKEditor. Both provide native collaboration features (like Comments, Mentions, Suggested Edits, and Revision History) within a single architecture. This reduces coordination overhead and makes integrating these features faster and easier. ou’ll know that they will all work together without a lot of extra programming duct tape. 

Tiptap, by contrast, is highly modular. But that flexibility requires assembling multiple community-maintained extensions. For example, to get document history, you’ll need Snapshot, Document History, and Snapshot Compare—and then you’ll need to wire those into your backend. 

Meanwhile, Froala lacks built-in support for most collaboration features. To enable co-editing in Froala, you’d need to integrate an external library like Codox, and comments, document history, and mentions aren’t available at all.

So while all rich text editors can offer collaboration with enough effort, not all give you a coherent, low-effort path to get there.

Strategic ways to reduce integration effort

The easiest way to reduce the pains of integrating collaboration features into your app? Choose an RTE that was built with collaboration in mind.

• Pick native over piecemeal: Fewer third-party dependencies mean fewer bugs, version conflicts, and security vulnerabilities to manage long-term. That’s less risk for your app in the future. 
• Centralize user identity: TinyMCE’s User Lookup API and CKEditor’s UserIntegration plugin allow you to pass user data across collaboration features consistently.
• Start with a proof of concept for your LOE: Don't guess. Walk through the six categories with your team to gauge the level of effort specifically needed from them to satisfy your app’s requirements. 
• Evaluate your real-time needs: For most apps, async collaboration (comments, suggestions) meets user needs with less risk. 

Wrap up: plan the effort to minimize surprises

Not all editors are created equal, and neither are their integration paths. Estimating the level of effort early will save your team time, resources, and a lot of unexpected rework. In every project, there will be setbacks and roadblocks that you couldn’t see when you started. That’s completely normal. You’re mitigating those surprises and roadblocks up front by estimating your team’s LOE from the outset. Here’s what to remember:

• Features like Comments and Revision History are never just plug-and-play, because they’ll need a back end to serve the related user data to your RTE.
• Collaboration multiplies complexity, especially across user roles and document state.
• Native architectures like TinyMCE and CKEditor give you a clearer, lower-risk implementation path.

Want to scope out what this would look like for your team with a specific editor? Contact TinyMCE to get your questions about integration answered.