What Is CKEditor? The Rich-Text Editor for Any Application

What is CKEditor? In simple terms, it’s a rich-text editor (RTE) component that developers add to web applications. And it’s the RTE that can do nearly anything, offering a balance between lightweight editors that don’t scale and overly complex RTEs that require heavy customization to even run.

It’s feature-rich out of the box and works without taxing setup and development. And it shines in its customizability, with native support for front-end libraries like Angular or React and more than 300+ features to add.

On the market for more than 20 years, CKEditor has played a critical supporting role in apps from small startups to sprawling Fortune 500 projects.

In short, CKEditor is the RTE for any application or situation.

This post will demystify CKEditor, introduce the basics, and give developers and product managers a sense of how it will help.

#What is CKEditor? A modern, composable RTE

CKEditor is a composable, modern rich-text editor that can be implemented anywhere in any application (from WYSIWYG editors to inline commenting). Over two decades, CKEditor has been known by several names and versions—starting with FCKEditor and more recently called CKEditor 4.

CKEditor 5 is the latest release, built from scratch on a new architecture perfect for collaborative editing, and will be the version we reference as CKEditor through the rest of this blog. It offers a premier developer and end-user experience, backed by a team of 50+ highly experienced developers.

The editor sits apart from other RTEs via composability. The application separates the model (the data layer) and the view (the presentation layer) to:

• Simplify customization: Create features that modify the data or presentation without worrying about breaking the other layer.

• Reduce maintenance: Debug code easily by abstracting the two layers, requiring less expertise to solve issues.

• Enable real-time collaboration: Allow users to edit in real time from a single data source. Decoupling the view and model makes this possible; otherwise, the presentation layer logic might cause hiccups for the underlying data.

Some users look for more lightweight RTEs. But CKEditor’s composable, component-based, and plugin-based architecture means nearly everything is a plugin, including typing. We also offer robust supporting APIs to enable deep customization.

#What is CKEditor used for?

Developers use CKEditor to add flexible rich-text editing to applications for use cases, including:

• Creating web content on blogs or websites with support for intuitive features

• Internal knowledge bases or wikis

• Email creation, including email marketing or internal project updates with support for templates and merge fields

• Full-featured document editing, with support for everything from multi-leveled lists, document outlines, strong table support, restrictive editing, and collaborative editing

• Social feeds such as activity streams, comment threads, news feeds, and other asynchronous and synchronous messaging services between team members

See CKEditor in action by visiting our demos page.

Building these in-house is an uphill battle. Consider the challenges of creating a full WYSIWYG editor, required for creating web content. You’ll have to deal with inconsistent browser behavior, learn how to force specific HTML tags (such as the paragraph tag after hitting “enter”), and meet multiple accessibility standards. Plus, collaborative editing requires early architectural planning and significant development for conflict resolution. CKEditor already handles these complexities.

#Why use CKEditor?

CKEditor brings a lot to the table for both the business and the developer. Whether it’s lower development costs, deep customizability, or reliable enterprise performance, the editor offers significant advantages for application development.

#Strong developer experience

Developers can build their editor with traditional high-code experiences using the language, library, or framework of their choice.

CKEditor also offers a guided visual experience to create your own editor using the Builder functionality. With this, you can:

• Select from multiple editor types

• Choose which features and plug-ins to add

• Decide the type of toolbar UI for your editor

The Builder will provide you with the output to integrate CKEditor into your project. You can try this for yourself by visiting the Builder on CKEditor.com.

Additionally, you can customize and configure the editor to fit your project needs. We built the editor to connect to today’s development ecosystem and tech stacks. This includes integrations with the most popular development libraries and frameworks:

• Angular

• React

• Next.js

• Nuxt

• Vue.js

• Salesforce

• Svelte

• Spring-boot

• SharePoint SPFx

• Drupal

• CSS frameworks, including Bootstrap, Foundation, Materialize, and Semantic UI

But you’re not limited to these. CKEditor is framework-agnostic. You can use it with any front-end framework for your project. On top of that, CKEditor is open source and has an active community of developers.

#Reduce development time with ready-made, modern features

Unlike competitors like TipTap that require extensive setups, CKEditor can be immediately added to applications, saving development time. All capabilities were tested and crafted for a strong user experience (which leads to strong user adoption).

#Collaboration

As teams grow more distributed, users need to work in tandem. Collaboration tools have become must-haves. CKEditor offers full support for:

• Real-time and asynchronous collaboration

• Track changes and suggestions

• Comments and comment histories

• Revision histories to simplify version control and allow for reversions

View more collaboration features.

#Content conversion and embedding

Ever copied and pasted from Word into a WYSIWYG editor (or vice versa)? Then you may be groaning on the inside right now while thinking about table formatting, alignment, or image embedding issues. CKEditor simplifies this by letting users:

• Export content to PDF, Word, or HTML with styles and comments intact

• Import content from Word or Excel into HTML with styling and comments attached

• Add video or images easily by either using a toolbar or pasting directly into inline content

View more content conversion and embedding features.

#Email editing

As mentioned earlier, creating a working email editor places a strong burden on development teams. But CKEditor offers a pre-built WYSIWYG editor that lets end users:

• Build responsive emails that work across email services and devices

• Reuse content blocks that retain formatting

• Import from Word and paste from Word, Google Docs, and Excel

The editor offers both automatic CSS inline styling for a strong design and multi-root editing for handling complex layouts. Plus, CKEditor includes an email configuration check that flags instances of plug-ins causing issues with your editor.

View more email editing features.

#Artificial intelligence

Text editing was one of the earliest and most obvious use cases for generative AI. So, users expect it. CKEditor allows you to offer support here for your end users. Developers can select foundation models provided by OpenAI, Azure, or Amazon Bedrock. You can also bring your own model, if preferred.

Additionally, CKEditor’s AI capabilities allow your end users to:

• Select from pre-made prompts or create their own

• Refine and analyze content using a conversational chat interface

• Improve response accuracy with greater context by adding direct links or documents

• Reuse conversations in the same document using a chat history

• Personalize the AI with AI profiles and custom AI commands

• Improve quality using AI-powered grammar, spelling, and tone checks

• Get fast recommendations with one-click AI suggestions

View CKEditor’s AI capabilities.

#Page management

Users working on longer documents need sophisticated document management to simplify reading and improve layout. CKEditor supports that by letting users:

• Add in-page layout structures such as pagination or page breaks

• Outline documents and list key headings in a table for easier navigation

• Create tables of contents automatically that update dynamically

View more page management features.

#File management

Your end users shouldn’t have to wrestle too much with media uploads. Instead, you can:

• Take advantage of our pre-built integration with CKBox, which provides a browser-like interface for secure file storage and uploads

• Add media via server uploads or embed them with inline base 64 code

View more file management features.

#Productivity

Want to increase end-user satisfaction? Then make them more productive with features that let them:

• Reduce content formatting grunt work with intuitive pasting from Word or Excel

• Leverage automation features like merge fields, automatic conversion of URLs into clickable links, and more

• Give users quick access to features and formatting with slash commands

• Copy and apply formatting across multiple sections to improve consistency

View more productivity features.

#Configurations

Your RTE should look like a part of your application and behave as users expect. CKEditor facilitates this by letting you:

• Add multiple types of toolbars depending on the context

• Modify toolbars to meet your application’s design

• Support accessible and localized content with more than 38 professionally translated language packs

View more configuration features.

#Maintain branding with a customizable, user-friendly UI

Some RTEs like TipTap are fully headless and don’t offer a UI, requiring heavy development to get set up at all. It’s an option if you truly need full control.

But CKEditor offers common RTE elements and toolbars to fit various use cases (whether they call for a full WYSIWYG editor in a CMS or an inline editing element for a comment) with the option of complete control. Here are just a few of the UI options:

#Classic editor

Add a full editor to any web application page or form with a toolbar that follows the user down the page as they edit.

#Document editor

Add a full Google Docs or Word-like experience to any application. This is particularly helpful for users creating print documents.

#Inline editing UIs

CKEditor is much more than a WYSIWYG editor. It allows inline editing on any page through balloon-style toolbars or inline editing. For instance, with the balloon UI, users select text and a toolbar appears:

#Headless editor

You may prefer full control over the UI. We offer that as well with our headless editor option, which lets you create your own UI using any front-end technology. And as mentioned earlier, we offer integrations for common front-end libraries like React, Angular, or Vue as well as CSS frameworks.

#Maintain reliability and scalability with enterprise-grade capabilities

CKEditor is enterprise-grade. When you choose CKEditor, you get:

• Scalability and reliability: Scale as you grow with deployments battle-tested across Fortune 500 deployments. Plus, CKEditor offers 99.99% uptime with multi-zone redundancy and full backup and disaster recovery.

• Security and compliance: Protect your data with multi-layered security, granular permissions, and data encryption. And we meet strict compliance requirements such as SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and accessibility standards like US Section 508 and WCAG 2.2 levels A and AA.

• Flexible deployment: Choose between cloud, on-prem, or hybrid deployments with full support for Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS.

• Strong quality and support: CKEditor offers 100% code coverage, with robust testing and quality assurance. Plus, we offer comprehensive documentation and flexible support packages with additional customer care and assistance.

• Multiple plans: We offer flexible pricing tiers and custom pricing for customers needing more than 20,000 editor loads per month. Contact us to find the right plan for your project.

#CKEditor: The rich text editor for any situation

So, what is CKEditor used for? Pretty much anything. Developers get a feature-rich RTE component from day one that leaves room for deep customization. CKEditor is a go-to RTE component for product managers looking for reduced development time, flexibility for differing business needs, and strong user satisfaction.

See for yourself by starting a free 14-day trial.