Compare Froala to TinyMCE – Which is the best WYSIWYG editor?

The search for Tinymce Alternative usually begins when you realize you need to add a rich-text editing feature to your product. First, you go to Google. Then, after some deep research, you find yourself deciding to compare and choose between TinyMCE and Froala.

To be sure, any comparison between the two begins with looking at the features of each editor, followed by a detailed pricing plan analysis to determine the best value for your money. So which is the best WYSIWYG Editor? Let’s find it out!

Features

By all means, both editors have a long list of great features. For example, look at the Froala +100 feature list. Obviously, it would be impossible to include all of them in this post. Instead, we will focus on important features that benefit all users.

Without a doubt, both editors include all the basic features for rich content editing. For example, both of them handle images and tables flawlessly. Moreover, they both also support advanced functionalities like real-time editing.

With that in mind, we will focus instead on editor design, scalability, customization, and load time. We will also look at the ease of integration with your products.

Does it look good for your users?

This one you can easily judge for yourself. That’s because it takes about 50 milliseconds to form an opinion. Just a quick look at the two editors and you will know which one is better. For me, it’s obviously Froala. The flat interface, SVG icons, and buttons as well as dropdowns and pop-ups—every detail looks amazing.

In addition, the Froala Smart Toolbar groups all actions by scope into four categories. As a result, you can keep a vast range of features handy without overwhelming your users with hundreds of buttons. It is unquestionably a step ahead of other editors.

Mobile support is another key point when talking about editor design. It’s also an area where Froala, with its full mobile support, has always been ahead. In short, Froala is the first WYSIWYG editor with popup formatting controls that appear the same on both mobile devices and desktops. Finally, Froala is the first WYSIWYG HTML editor with image and video resize that works even on mobile devices.

It is obvious that, when it comes to design, Froala wins.

Is it scalable, and how easy is it to customize?

No matter how perfect your editor is, at a certain point you will need to customize it. This customization could be related to:

• Style

  Both editors have different theme options and different initialization modes. But, only with Froala, can you easily display different toolbar buttons for large, medium, small, and very small screens. To make this happen you just need to set the toolbarButtons, toolbarButtonsMD, and toolbarButtonsSM, as well as the toolbarButtonsXS options. This, above all, makes Froala the most responsive editor on the web.

• Functionality

  Froala has comprehensive but straightforward API documentation, because it puts all options, events, and methods on one page, making it easy to go through and understand. Froala also has tons of live examples of code you can base your projects on. Everything from adding a custom button to creating a custom plugin is well explained.

  The TinyMCE API documentation, on the other hand, is hard to understand. It is divided into classes, and you have to check each class reference to learn about its methods and properties.

Does it affect your product speed?

Froala initializes in less than 40 milliseconds, six times faster than the blink of an eye. To sum up, no one on your website will notice the difference.

How easy is it to integrate into your products?

Unlike TinyMCE, which provides only 15 integration guides, Froala provides 17 framework libraries. It is also the first editor to provide SDK libraries for integration with six different servers. The Froala SDK libraries are designed to simplify the interaction of the editor with the server which makes things like storing images and files or computing the Amazon S3 signature work flawlessly.

Another point for Froala.

Pricing

Taking a quick look at the TinyMCE pricing page, you will find that the first plan is free and the pro plan is $99/month. On the other hand, Froalas’s first plan is $199/year. You may think, “Froala looks pretty good, but isn’t it a bit expensive?” Dig deeper into the plan details and you will eventually say, “You guys look 10x cheaper. Why is that?”

Let’s do some analysis and discover why Froala is much cheaper.

First, is your product eligible for the TinyMCE free plan?

Firstly, the TinyMCE free plan is not for every use case and is not suitable for every product. If you need any of the following you cant use the free plan:

• Need to use one of the premium features, which include:
  • Paste formatted content from Microsoft and Google Docs.
  • Export your content as PDF
  • Spell Checker Pro
  • Accessibility Checker
  • … and more
• Need Professional support
• Want to sublicense TinyMCE under a different license than LGBL (unless that license is GPL); each user who receives TinyMCE from you has the same rights as you do
• Want to remove the “Powered by Tiny” branding
• Don’t want to state or share any changes you have made to TinyMCE
• Don’t want to include the copyright notices
• Don’t want to include the full text of the LGPL v2.1
• Want to use White Label, Commercial Agreement, Dual Deployment or Custom Licensing
• Want to use more than 200 free collaborative sessions per month when using the Real-time Collaboration feature.

Why should I consider Froala if I’m eligible for a free TinyMCE plan?

No one wants to pay money when they have a free option, however, going the free route could cause you to miss out on better opportunities. Look at the Froala perpetual license for example—it gives you the right to use the latest version of the editor plus all its plugins forever with affordable fees. It is cheaper than creating a similar editor from scratch. In addition, access to updates and professional support for a year makes it an incredible offer!

This is your chance to get an intuitive and well-maintained editor with all of its advanced functionality. Moreover, even with all these features, Froala is a lightweight and fast editor with a clean pluggable coding architecture – all for a one-time fixed cost.

You can consider buying Froala under a perpetual license as an investment in your product. It will be your editor with no limitations or mandatory brand text. You are free to customize it for your brand.

Although you may not need the editor advanced features now, looking to the future, when your product gets bigger, you certainly will need to add new features to your WYSIWYG editor. If you request a feature, with Froala, there will be a good chance that your requests become features. That’s because the Froala team adds new editor features based on user requests.

In addition, Froala supports new businesses by providing an Ignition discount—a 35% discount for Pro and Enterprise plans. Conversely, if you have fewer than 50 active monthly users, request a discount.

What about Froala vs. TinyMCE subscription plans?

Let’s start with a quick comparison between Froala and TinMCE subscription plan features:

Which plans should I compare?

A point often overlooked is that there are some misconceptions when it comes to comparing Froala pricing plans to TinyMCE pricing plans. One common mistake, for instance, is comparing the TinyMCE Professional plan to the Froala Enterprise plan just because they are the highest plans with a known price in each brand. The fact is that the Froala Enterprise plan is the same as the Froala Pro plan except that it allows you to use Froala with unlimited products instead of one.

Difference between Froala Pro and Froala Enterprise plans

Moreover, since the TinyMCE Professional plan only allows you to use the editor with one product, you should compare the TinyMCE Flexible plan to the Froala Enterprise plan or the TinyMCE Professional plan to the Froala Pro plan. Clearly, these comparisons are in favor of Froala, look at the following tables

TinyMCE Flexible plan VS Froala Enterprise

TinyMCE Professional plan VS Froala PRO

Alternatively, if you compare at least two TinyMCE Professional plans to the Froala Enterprise plan, the Froala editor will be more cost-effective too. That is thanks to the Froala Enterprise plan’s fixed price. The following graph demonstrates this:

Another misconception occurs when you compare just the plan pricing. This is because TinyMCE doesn’t use transparent pricing models like Froala. For instance, TinyMCE Professional plan limits its editor to 10,000 loads per month. After that, they charge $0.025 for each additional load. This means that if you expect, for example, an additional 20,000 views per month on pages that use TinyMCE—a reasonable number to expect when you launch your product—it will cost you an additional $500 per month. Moreover, each time a user views or refreshes one of those pages, you will pay more.

Believe it or not, the TinyMCE plan’s cost could reach $25K per month or more due to the additional editor loads. By comparison, Froala charges a fixed cost per month, which makes it the most cost-effective editor.

Check out the following graph:

Cost Savings

Whether you need an editor for a simple personal application, a blog, SaaS, an intranet, or mobile apps or you want to use it on an enterprise scale, Froala provides significant cost savings. For an average use case (5,000 – 25,000 loads), Froala plans can save from 100% to 800% when compared with similar TinyMCE plans.

You can determine your cost savings using the following calculator:

Why is Froala 10x cheaper?

It is because Froala plans use transparent and all-inclusive pricing. With every Froala subscription plan, you also get unlimited editor loads. In contrast, TinyMCE limits editor loads and any excess load costs you more money. TinyMCE also limits the free use of real-time collaboration features and doesn’t give you access to all plugins. All in all, Froala subscription plans pricing is much cheaper for all the features it provides:

✔  Unlimited active users 

Froala doesn’t restrict usage on the number of users, servers, or real-time editor instantiations

✔  All features included

No hidden fees for additional plugins or features

✔  Unlimited editor loads

Use Froala as much as you want

✔  Professional/community support 

Our support team is here to help resolve any pressing issues

✔  Perpetual licensing with free updates for one year 

Froala makes it easy for teams to collaborate with hassle-free licensing

Why isn’t Froala editor open source?

The Froala editor team once thought about making it open source and offering commercial support, but we believe that people have some misconceptions about open source products, such as:

• Open source is free.
• Open source is better maintained.
• Open source is all about the community.
• Open source lacks support.
• Open source is enterprise-grade.

We discussed these points in detail here. Eventually, we realized that growing a product based on the misconceptions people have that open source means free software is wrong.

Which WYSIWYG editor should I use?

Froala has definitely succeeded in becoming the top WYSIWYG editor. This is evident from the number of migrations to Froala from other editors, such as TinyMCE. It is also clear that Froala is the top-rated WYSIWYG editor by customers on G2. It is unsurprising because Froala is a lightweight WYSIWYG editor with an incredibly clean design. Its intuitive interface also accommodates 100+ features without overwhelming users with a complex and complicated GUI. In addition, Froala has easy-to-follow documentation and easily integrates with your products. Simply put, your users will love it. Overall, Froala Editor is the best choice for your editing requirements, and with its affordable pricing plans, it is a “do more, pay less” editor.

Can I test Froala before I buy it?

We decided to make the entire product transparent for you, and offer you hands-on experience with our editor—test the Froala Editor yourself by downloading the free trial.

How can I migrate to Froala from TinyMCE?

Migration from TinyMCE to Froala is easy, it takes less than five minutes. Follow the step-by-step guide to migrate to the best WYSIWYG editor out there. You can certainly migrate to Froala now and choose to buy later.

Are you ready to buy the next-generation WYSIWYG HTML editor?

Choose the plan that’s right for you.