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guideReal-time collaboration overview

The real-time collaboration features let many users simultaneously edit content, leave comments, suggest changes, and access revision history. You can include these features in any CKEditor 5 build and tailor them to your needs.

This is a premium feature and you need a license for it on top of your CKEditor 5 commercial license. Contact us to receive an offer tailored to your needs.

You can also sign up for the CKEditor Premium Features 30-day free trial to test the feature.

# Demo

Try CKEditor 5 collaboration features in the demo below. Use the comments, track changes, and revision history toolbar items to enable each feature.

Share the complete URL of this page with your colleagues to collaborate in real time!

This demo presents a limited set of features. Visit the feature-rich editor example to see more in action.

This sample automatically switches between the comments and suggestions display modes depending on the screen size. Resize the browser window and observe how the editor changes its appearance accordingly. See the Annotations display mode guide for more details.

The CKEditor 5 real-time collaboration experience is enabled by several plugins that can be added to the editor build just like any other CKEditor 5 plugin.

These include two base, real-time-collaboration-oriented features:

  • Real-time collaborative editing – Allows for editing the same document by multiple users simultaneously. It also automatically solves all conflicts if users make changes at the same time.
  • Users selection and presence list – Shows the selection of other users and lets you view the list of users currently editing the content in the editor.

We also provide plugins that integrate our other premium collaboration features with real-time editing:

  • Real-time collaborative comments – Makes it possible to add comments to any part of content in the editor.
  • Real-time collaborative track changes – Changes to the content are saved as suggestions that can be accepted or discarded later.
  • Real-time revision history – Create and view the chronological revision history of the document.

Refer to the Real-time collaboration features integration guide to learn how to enable real-time collaboration in your WYSIWYG editor.

You can read more about CKEditor 5’s collaboration features and their real-life implementations in this dedicated blog post.

CKEditor 5 Collaboration Features are customizable and can be configured to suit your needs. We strongly encourage you to read other collaboration feature guides to learn how you can use and customize these features. All guides apply to real-time editing environment too!

Additionally, custom plugins you provide will automatically integrate with real-time collaborative editing (very complex plugins may need additional effort to provide real-time editing integration).

This feature is enabled by default in the superbuild only. See the integration guide to learn how to enable it in your editor.