Pell vs ProseMirror

Pell is a free, self-hosted WYSIWYG text editor for web pages. It is written in pure JavaScript using ES6 and has no dependencies. The package is listed at 1.38 kB minified and gzipped, or 3.54 kB minified. Built-in actions cover bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, headings, paragraphs, quotes, lists, code, horizontal rules, links, and images. You can add custom actions and decide which controls appear and in what order. Styling can be changed through Pell’s Sass file or by overriding CSS. The onChange callback provides the editor’s HTML output, and the project demonstrates converting that HTML to Markdown with Turndown. Installation is documented through npm or by including a browser script and stylesheet. React and Vue examples are available. Listed browser support includes IE 9+, Chrome 5+, Firefox 4+, Safari 5+, and Opera 11.6+. Pell uses the MIT license.

ProseMirror is a toolkit for developers building rich-text editors on the web. It supports structured documents through a WYSIWYG-style interface while letting applications define document shape and content. Instead of treating a document as an HTML blob, it gives application code control over a custom data structure. Schemas and plugins provide ways to customize that structure and extend editor behavior. Four core modules handle the document model, editor state, view, and transformations; additional modules offer commands, key bindings, undo history, input macros, collaboration, and a basic schema. Multiple people can edit together in real time. Examples cover Markdown, image uploads, custom schemas, menus, code editors, footnotes, and track changes. ProseMirror is free, open source, and legally usable commercially; it can be self-hosted and is installed through npm. It works in recent Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Edge versions, as well as Internet Explorer 11. It is a modular toolkit rather than a ready-made editor component, and implementation generally involves a bundler.