BlockNote vs. Less vs. Plate vs. Swift Comparison Chart

​BlockNote is an open source, block-based rich text editor for React that offers a polished, Notion-style user experience with minimal setup. It comes with built-in UI components like menus and toolbars, which are fully customizable. It supports drag-and-drop functionality, allowing users to organize content into blocks that can be nested or rearranged. Developers can extend the editor with custom blocks, schemas, and plugins, benefiting from first-class TypeScript support for type safety and autocompletion. BlockNote enables real-time collaboration using Yjs, with support for providers like Liveblocks and PartyKit, allowing multiple users to edit documents simultaneously. It also supports theming, markdown, and HTML conversion, and can be used with vanilla JavaScript for non-React projects. Built on top of ProseMirror and TipTap, BlockNote simplifies the process of adding a rich text editor to applications, eliminating the need to build interface elements from scratch.

​Plate is a rich-text editor framework for React, designed to simplify complex text editing needs. Built with Slate.js and TypeScript, it offers a highly customizable and extensible editing experience. Plate provides a wide range of plugin packages that enhance the behavior, hooks, serialization, normalization, and other features of the editor. These plugins are "headless," meaning they are unstyled by default, allowing developers to style them as needed. It includes state management with Zustand stores, custom hotkeys, API methods, and transforms accessible through editor.api and editor.transforms. Plate also offers unstyled and accessible components based on Radix UI, serving as the foundation for building high-quality design systems. For those seeking a visually appealing interface, Plate provides pre-built styled components based on shadcn/ui, which can be customized to create a unique, accessible, and visually pleasing user interface.