CKEditor vs TinyMCE

Over the past two decades, both CKEditor and TinyMCE have pioneered rich text editing. They jointly deserve credit for shaping the industry into what it is today.

Both editors are considered enterprise-grade, are available under an open source license and have stellar engineering teams that stand behind their products.

So what’s the difference between CKEditor and TinyMCE?

Three things often come up: use case, content type, and licensing.

USE CASE

Both editors excel in their respective use cases.

As an editor framework, CKEditor 5’s biggest strength is collaboration and complete customization of the editor. With features like Track Changes and Real-time Collaboration, it’s a great choice for situations where you want to offer multi-user document editing experiences similar to Google Docs.

However, there is a tradeoff – CKEditor users report the editor having a steep learning curve and being cumbersome to set up, as it requires heavy configuration even for a basic install.

On the other hand, TinyMCE can be set up in just six lines of code. And with our use-case-specific starter configs, you’re only one copy-paste away from adding rich text editing into your app to match its exact editing needs.

CONTENT TYPE

Consider TinyMCE if your content will be saved as HTML
TinyMCE is ideal in situations where you’re creating content that will be rendered as HTML, for example emails, web pages or any other online content. The editor contents are entirely HTML-based, which means TinyMCE delivers a true WYSIWYG experience – content is rendered in the editor the exact same way it is in the browser. No surprises.

CKEditor stores data in a tree-like structure of elements and text nodes, but also introduces additional complexity. If you aren’t targeting HTML output and need powerful collaborative features, CKEditor can be a viable choice.

LICENSING

CKEditor and TinyMCE both offer open source licenses. However:

CKEditor 5 is available under a copyleft GPL2+ license, which requires you to share your source code with the community (not ideal for proprietary software).

CKEditor also offers a free commercial license, which does not require you to release your code to the public, but there are some restrictions. You can only use the free commercial license for an app that has a maximum of five active users and two developers working on it. So, if you have more than five customers or a team of more than two developers, you must pay to use CKEditor.

TinyMCE’s free open source MIT license has no limits on usage, users or developers, and no requirement to publicly share your source code. The MIT license is known as the "gold standard" among the open source community for its flexibility.

Enterprise-Grade Support

Responsive, in-house support to help you implement, customize and troubleshoot.

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Community

Thousands of questions and answers updated daily on StackOverflow and Github.

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“TinyMCE satisfied our needs at a competitive cost, and we were able to integrate it without restructuring our product.”

Chris Burd | Vice President of policyIQ

“TinyMCE should be at the top of any list if you’re looking for a visual text editor. It’s flexible, integrates well with different systems and is extremely stable.”

Rob Wells | Vice President of policyIQ

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