Great question!
If you're building your own rich-text editor from scratch and wondering whether to base it on Tiptap or directly on ProseMirror, here's a clear, up-to-date (2025) comparison to help you choose the right foundation.
| Criteria | ProseMirror (raw) | Tiptap (built on ProseMirror) | Winner for "building your own editor" |
|---|---|---|---|
| Learning curve | Steep -- you write everything yourself | Much gentler -- 90 % of boilerplate is already solved | Tiptap |
| Flexibility & full control | Maximum -- you control every single detail | Very high, but you are inside Tiptap's abstraction layer | ProseMirror |
| Development speed | Very slow -- you have to implement marks, nodes, commands, keymaps, input rules, paste handling, etc. | Extremely fast -- most things "just work" out of the box | Tiptap |
| Bundle size | You decide -- can be tiny if you only implement what you need | Slightly larger (≈ 60--90 kB gzipped with StarterKit) | ProseMirror (if you optimize) |
| TypeScript support & DX | Good, but many types are very generic | Excellent first-class TypeScript, auto-completion, docs | Tiptap |
| Ecosystem & extensions | Very few ready-made nodes/marks | Huge ecosystem (100+ official + community extensions) | Tiptap |
| Collaborative editing (Y.js, etc.) | You integrate everything yourself | Official Collaboration & CollaborationCursor extensions (very mature in 2025) | Tiptap |
| Track Changes / Versioning / Diffing | You have to build 100 % yourself | Free community track-changes extension + official Snapshot/SnapshotCompare in Pro | Tiptap |
| Menu / Toolbar / Bubble menu | You code everything | Built-in commands, useMenu, useBubbleMenu hooks (React/Vue/Svelte) | Tiptap |
| Maintenance burden | You maintain everything forever | Tiptap team maintains the hard parts (ProseMirror upgrades, bug fixes, security) | Tiptap |
| When you need something very unusual | You can do literally anything | 99 % of cases are still possible (you can always drop down to ProseMirror transactions) | Tie |
Real-world conclusions in 2025
99 % of teams that say "I'm building my own editor" should actually start with Tiptap and only drop down to raw ProseMirror transactions when Tiptap truly blocks them.
Choose Tiptap if you want:
- To ship a production-grade editor in weeks instead of months
- Collaboration, track changes, comments, tables, mentions, AI commands, etc.
- Great TypeScript experience and huge extension marketplace
- To stay up-to-date with ProseMirror fixes without doing the work yourself
Tiptap is basically "ProseMirror + all the hard parts already solved + modern framework integrations".
Choose raw ProseMirror only if at least one of these is true:
- You need an extremely small bundle (< 30 kB) for a very constrained environment
- You have highly unconventional content models that none of the existing nodes/marks can represent
- You cannot accept any abstraction layer at all (very rare)
- You are building something that is not really a "document" editor (e.g. a code editor, canvas-like node editor, etc.)
Recommendation for almost everyone in 2025
Start with Tiptap v2 (or Tiptap v3 if it's stable by now).
You still have 100 % of ProseMirror's power because everything in Tiptap is just ProseMirror under the hood:
ts
// You can always escape the abstraction when needed
editor.view.dispatch(editor.state.tr)
editor.commands.command(({ tr }) => {
// full ProseMirror Transaction API available
return true
})Most companies that originally started with raw ProseMirror in 2020--2023 have now migrated to Tiptap (Notion clones, Laravel Nova replacements, etc.).
Bottom line
For building your own editor in 2025 → Tiptap is the clear winner unless you have a very good reason to suffer with raw ProseMirror. You'll get 5--10× faster development, better maintainability, and you still keep all the power when you really need it.