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

Comparing Froala Editor with TinyMCE, highlighting differences and functionalities.

The search for TinyMCE alternative usually begins when you realize you need to add a rich-text editing feature to your product. 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 out!

Features

By all means, both editors have a long list of prominent 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 Math Equation insertion and 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. Just a quick look at the two editors and you will know which one is better. For me, it’s 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 resizing that works even on mobile devices.

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 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 is lighter than TinyMCE, resulting in a smaller impact on page load speed. Additionally, Froala’s modular architecture enables you to include only the necessary JavaScript and stylesheet files for the plugins you intend to use, making it more efficient for your product page speed.

How easy is it to integrate into your products?

Both Froala and TinyMCE offer SDKs for integrating with frontend frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue. However, Froala’s server-side SDK library sets it apart. The Froala server-side 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 find that the first plan is free and the Essential plan is $67 per month. On the other hand, Froala’s first plan is $899 per year ($74.90 per month). 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 can’t use the free plan:

  • Need to use one of the premium features, which includes:
    • Markdown
    • Inline CSS
    • Export your content as PDF
    • Spell Checker.
    • Accessibility Checker
    • Math Equations
    • … and more
  • Need Professional support
  • Want to sub-license TinyMCE under a different license than GPL2+; 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 over 1000 editor loads per month when using the cloud hosting 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!

Plan Professional Enterprise
Perpetual License cost $2,699 $5,999

This is your chance to get an intuitive and well-maintained editor with all of its advanced functionality. Moreover, 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.

In addition, Froala supports new businesses by providing an Ignition discount. 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 general comparison between Froala and TinMCE subscription plan features:

TinyMCE Froala
Free (Cloud-hosted )
Essential Professional Enterprise Professional Enterprise
$0 $67 $130 Custom $74.90 $166.90
per month per month per month per month
editor loads per month 1000 5000 20000 Custom Unlimited Unlimited
Domains 1 1 1 Multiple domains 3 Unlimited
Products 1 1 1 Multiple 1 Unlimited
Hosting Cloud-hosted Cloud-hosted Cloud-hosted Cloud or Self-hosted Cloud or Self-hosted Cloud or Self-hosted
Redistribution/OEM Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes
SaaS / Subscription Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes
Is ALL Features/Plugin included No NO NO Yes Yes Yes

Based on the above table, here are some use cases:

  1. You want to use the editor in multiple domains:
    1. In case you will use it on one product that is not SaaS or OEM, then you are eligible to choose the Froala Professional plan ($74.90 / month) or the TinyMCE Enterprise plan (Custom price – expected to be  $170+  / month)
    2. In case you will use your editor on multiple products or in SaaS or OEM products, then you can choose the Froala Enterprise plan ($166.90 / month) or the TinyMCE Enterprise plan (Custom price – expected to be  $170+  / month)

You can see, in both cases, that Froala is a much cheaper choice with no limitation on editor loads.

  1. You want to use the editor for one domain and one product that is not SaaS or OEM:

Here, you can select the Free, Essential, or Professional plan from TinyMCE or the Professional plan from Froala. Before you say TinyMCE is cheaper in this case, you should first calculate the real TinyMCE plan prices. This is because TinyMCE doesn’t use transparent pricing models like Froala. For instance, the TinyMCE Essential plan limits its editor to 5,000 loads per month. In the event your usage fluctuates above the editor load limit for your plan, TinyMCE will charge your credit card $40 for each additional block of 1,000 editor loads at the end of the month. This means that if you expect, for example, 6,000 views per month on pages that use TinyMCE, you will end up paying $107 instead of $67 per month, which is $32 per month above the Froala Professional plan cost. Moreover, each time a user views or refreshes one of those pages, you will pay more. Let’s see this graph to demonstrate that Froala is the cost-efficient tool in most cases

See the Pen
Froala VS TinyMCE Additional Cost 2024
by Froala Marketing (@Froala_marketing)
on CodePen.

The above graph lists Froala and TinyMCE plans cost/month against different editor loads. It shows that the Froala Professional plan is more cost-effective than TinyMCE plans, except in the following cases:

    1. You will subscribe to the TinyMCE Free plan and will keep editor loads at 2,999 times or fewer.
    2. You will subscribe to the TinyMCE Essential plan and will keep editor loads at 5,999 times or fewer.
  1. You want to use the editor for one domain and one product, that is SaaS or OEM:

In this case, you can select the Free, Essential, or Professional plan from TinyMCE or the Enterprise plan from Froala. Looking at the same above graph we can figure that the Froala Enterprise plan is more cost-effective than TinyMCE plans except in the following cases:

    1. You will subscribe to the TinyMCE Free plan and will keep editor loads at 5,999 times or fewer.
    2. You will subscribe to the TinyMCE Essential plan and will keep editor loads at 7,999 times or fewer.
    3. You will subscribe to the TinyMCE Professional plan and will keep editor loads at 20,999 times or fewer.

It’s worth noting that SaaS and OEM projects usually have a very large user base. Most likely, your editor will be loaded over 20,000 times. Moreover, Froala usually provides discounts (20%) on all plans for new clients.

Cost Savings

Whether you need an editor for a simple personal application, a blog, SaaS, an intranet, a mobile app or you want to use it on an enterprise scale, Froala provides significant cost savings. For an average use case (30,000 loads), Froala plans can save 217% or higher when compared with similar TinyMCE plans.

Calculate Your Cost Saving when using Froala instead of TinyMCE.

Why is Froala 10x cheaper?

It is because  Froala’s 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 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 or servers

✔  All features included

No hidden fees for additional plugins or features

✔  Unlimited editor loads

Use Froala as much as you want

✔  Perpetual licensing with free updates for one year 

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

Why isn’t the 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 succeeded in becoming one of the top WYSIWYG editors. It is also clear that Froala is the G2’s Top WYSIWYG Editor For Three Years in a Row. 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.

Posted on May 20, 2024

Mostafa Yousef

Senior web developer with a profound knowledge of the Javascript and PHP ecosystem. Familiar with several JS tools, frameworks, and libraries. Experienced in developing interactive websites and applications.

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