Ask HN: Which open-source editor would you choose to build something like Notion

Imagine you are building from scratch a Notion like editor with React, what would be your top choice today?

Some options to consider:

Slate: https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate Plate: https://github.com/udecode/plate (this is built on top of slate) Tiptap: https://github.com/ueberdosis/tiptap (this is built on top of ProseMirror) Novel: https://github.com/steven-tey/novel (this is built on top of Tiptap)

Which one of these would you choose? Are there other better options.

In my opinion Slate seems more flexible but is quite passive in terms of improvements and maintenance. On the other hand Tiptap seems very active but a bit limited due to using ProseMirror under the hood.

What are your thoughts?

7 comments

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hiimsteveee 2y ago ↗

Probably tiptap.dev, here's a notion-like editor built with it: https://github.com/steven-tey/novel

RetiredRichard 2y ago ↗

Oooh, Novel is also being used in Vercel's Platforms Starter Kit

https://github.com/vercel/platforms/tree/main

hakanderyal 2y ago ↗

I chose Lexical. Used heavily by Meta, good architecture.

Check out [0] this thread for some comments from an engineer at Notion.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31814983

meiraleal 2y ago ↗

Does any of them work with custom elements and/or Lit? If I was building something from scratch, I would make it compatible with React, Vue and Svelte basing it on Lit/custom elements.

philipisik 2y ago ↗

You can build a Notion-like editor on top of https://tiptap.dev :-) Here is a demo of what such an editor might look like: https://demos.tiptap.dev/

Since Tiptap is headless, you have the freedom to design and develop the UI exactly the way you want.

billconan 2y ago ↗

I used https://prosemirror.net/

dinkleberg 2y ago ↗

I would go with tiptap. Maybe it has changed a lot in the past year, but I did not have a good time working with slate.