Which is the best React rich text editor? Five options compared

Rich text editors are a core component of many web and mobile applications, allowing users to create text with bolding, emphasis, fonts, colors, and even embedded multimedia.

This guide will help you choose the best React rich text editor for your project and includes a tutorial and demonstration of Quill, one of the most popular WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) rich text editors for React apps.

What is a rich text editor?

In web development, rich text refers to formatted text that supports bolding, emphasis, colors, different fonts and sizes, links, subheadings, lists, and other formatting elements. In some cases, rich text can also include images and other media embedded inline with the text content.

The alternative to rich text is plain text, which is just text, with no included formatting. Word processors like Microsoft Word allow for the editing of rich text, while text editors like Notepad only support plain text.

A rich text editor is a user interface component that allows you to create, edit, and format rich text. Rich text editors are used as form inputs in websites and apps. For example, blogging and social media platforms provide rich text editors so that you can create expressive content with formatting, rather than being limited to plain text. Content management systems (CMSes) also rely on rich text editors for adding content to websites, apps, video broadcasts, electronic billboards, and other digital channels.

In most modern apps, rich text is stored as HTML or Markdown (or, less commonly, in JSON or JSON-like formats) and can be edited as raw code if necessary. Most users, however, want to see the text as it would appear to readers — that's what WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) is for. WYSIWYG rich text editors provide an interface to edit text with the formatting visible to you as you make changes, with options for applying bolding, emphasis, and other formatting using buttons, dropdowns to choose fonts, etc.

Note that the term "rich text" can also refer to text content that is structured as nodes (as an alternative to storing it as HTML or Markdown). This allows the text to be directly processed for search engine optimization (SEO), navigation, and parsing for display in different mediums. This kind of rich text can also include formatting information for use where it is supported, supplied by a rich text editor interface.

Five of the best React rich text editors

React is the most popular framework for building user interfaces for web apps, and as such there are many React-compatible rich text editors to choose from, each designed for different use cases and with different features.

Below is a high-level feature comparison of five of the best React rich text editors. This list includes only those that are actively maintained (having been updated in the last 12 months), making them suitable for use in new React projects and providing the best reliability and compatibility.

• TinyMCE is one of the oldest actively developed rich text editors (from 2004!) and is widely used in web apps.

• Jodit is designed to be lightweight with no dependencies as a faster alternative to older tools.

• Quill is an API-driven rich text editor, developed for Salesforce, that supports a wide range of use cases including collaborative editing.

• Slate is a highly customizable React rich text editor.

• Editor.js is a block-based editor that focuses on structured content.

React rich text editors compared

When choosing a React rich text editor for your project, you should compare the unique features and the support for the text formatting and data format you require.

Many of these rich text editors provide native support with React components and wrappers you can use in your app. In some cases, however, you will need to follow the documentation to build your own components, especially if you want more control over the behavior of your React rich text editor.

• TinyMCE React component

• Jodit React wrapper

• React Quill wrapper

• Slate React docs

• Editor.js React wrapper

How to use Quill with React

Quill is one of the most widely used React rich text editors. It has an active community and lots of documentation and use cases, making it suitable for demonstrating how to add a rich text editor to a React app. If you're just beginning with React, you can use our Contentful React Starter to bootstrap your project.

To get started, add Quill to your React project by running:

npm install quill

Then, import Quill in your React component:

import Quill from 'quill';

You should also import Quill's stylesheets, which provide several themes so you can match its appearance to your project:

import "quill/dist/quill.snow.css";

Here's an example of what this looks like in a basic React app:

App.js

In the above example, when the contents of the rich text editor are changed, the HTML is logged to the console. In a production app, this data would be submitted using a form request or API.

Alternatively, if you're happy with a slightly outdated version of Quill, you can use react-quill in your project. This provides state management and React bindings, meaning less setup and coding in your app.

Once you've implemented your React rich text editor, check out our top rich text field tips and tricks to get the most out of it.

Can you run into problems with React rich text editors?

React rich text editors provide an out-of-the box solution for what would otherwise be a complex feature to implement manually from scratch, especially those that provide native support for React with components and wrappers.

However, rich text editor libraries do have some downsides: some have incompatible or clumsy APIs making them difficult to integrate with existing projects, and updates can break their compatibility with your code or other libraries. 

The complexity of maintaining apps with rich text editing capabilities is further compounded once you add in image and media uploads and embedding (and have to implement an efficient way of loading and displaying them). This can quickly become a major source of technical debt as your application grows, especially if your requirements evolve to cover more publishing channels and formats.

Creating and managing rich text for your websites, apps, newsletters, and other digital outlets

Companies that drive engagement through digital experiences rely on Contentful to enable the creation, management, and distribution of content seamlessly and consistently across platforms. 

Contentful provides an App Framework that lets you tailor your workspace for your content creators and editors — including our own rich text editing tools that support media embedding — all without having to hand-code or integrate third-party React rich text editors (and other UI elements) yourself. 

You can then use our JavaScript SDKs to deploy your content (including rich text, images, and media) to your websites, apps, billboards, and other media channels using our high-speed global CDN for the best possible user experience.

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