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ckeditor
ckeditor5
JavaScript2017–2026
ckeditor / ckeditor5

ckeditor5

Powerful rich text editor framework with a modular architecture, modern integrations, and features like collaborative editing.

Developer ToolsWeb Development
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
8Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
10.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Powerful rich text editor framework with a modular architecture, modern integrations, and features like collaborative editing.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:45:45 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year10 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-10-19 09:38:32 UTC to 2026-03-17 12:39:55 UTC.

01232017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 2 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC220
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

3 sources
bojanz·Apr 2, 2019
Since you mentioned CKEditor 5, I'll be bold enough to go a bit into off-topic. CKEditor 5 is an incredibly impressive endeavour, and I've been following it with great interest. However, one of the things that separates it from the competition is the GPL license, which makes it impossible to use the editor in a permissively-licensed (Apache2/MIT) open source project. Your founder has indicated a readiness[1] to grant a custom license to such projects. So, I'm wondering whether that is still the policy, and how that's been working out in practice. Have any projects taken you up on the offer? Have there been any unforeseen problems? What are the legal limitations imposed (on distributors/forks of the project, for example)? [1]https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5/issues/991#issuecommen...
In Editor.js – Block Styled Editor
Reinmar·Mar 26, 2019
Which FOSS license? Because if it's a permissive one, like MIT, BSD or MPL, then you get results like we did with CKEditor 4: > From these thousands of businesses and millions of downloads, a very small group (less than 0,5%) decides to enter into business relations with CKSource. Source: https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5/issues/991 CKEditor (a rich-text editor) is this kind of really complex piece of software which requires years of experience and years of development. It's also a piece of software which is complex enough to scare people from contributing to it. So people use it for free and report bugs to you. That's all. With that conversion rate about 0.5% and a rather niche market, it's possible to slowly grow your business (as we did – CKSource is 40+ people today), but hard to keep up with the world. Just to give a context – CK
Read the rest
Editor 5 (which was written completely from scratch) required 5+ experienced developers working for more than 4 years right now. Therefore, for CKEditor 5 we chose GPL2+. We hope to have a more healthy paying/free users ratio. The future will show us if that's a good direction BTW, you say that: > commercial licenses can be a serious pain to navigate in many companies From my experience, it's actually the opposite. Companies like our commercial license because it's easier for them than going with e.g. LGPL or MPL and hoping they won't violate it.
In Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license
Reinmar·Mar 26, 2019
It was even worse for CKEditor: > From these thousands of businesses and millions of downloads, a very small group (less than 0,5%) decides to enter into business relations with CKSource. Source: https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5/issues/991 However, the difference is that all CKEditor 4's plugins were open sourced and licensed under a permissive set of GPL2+/LGPL/MPL licenses. So the project was funded by a combination of support, SLAs and commercial licenses. With CKEditor 5 (a completely new project) we chose GPL2+. I will be able to tell you how it worked for us in a couple of years
In Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license

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