ASP.NET MVC2 Rich Text Editor

Question

basically, my question is pretty much similar and has been asked numerous times. Which WYSIWYG editor is better now that Telerik has released their MVC editor, would it be wise to purchase the entire suite instead?

Selections:

TinyMCE

CKEditor

Telerik MVC Editor

Answer 1

Disclaimer: As part of the Telerik MVC team (and one of the editor developers), my opinion is quite biased, yet I can shed some light on the differences between the editors.

All of them are open source

Despite Todd's answer, the Telerik MVC editor is open-source, under GPLv2 license (with a commercial license available). Our support is well known, so I guess this is where we stand out (though it is paid). On the other hand, both TinyMCE and CKEditor have huge communities, which may help quickly, too.

Different feature set

This has been the first release of the Telerik MVC editor, while CK and TinyMCE have been around the block for a very long time. We have mixed feelings about this -- while we are missing out on quite a few tools/features, we have invested a lot of time in polishing the existing ones (converting list items to headings, pasting from MS Word). Our bet is on cleaner, more robust code (4k LoC vs 14k LoC in TinyMCE without plug-ins).

It depends on your requirements

After all, with the Telerik suite, you get... well... a suite of components with common code and themes. So if you need the dedicated support and the other components and the limited feature set does not make a difference, Telerik would be a nice choice. If you need a full-scale editor and want to bet on more feature-complete products, TinyMCE and CKEditor are the wiser choice.

I hope this helps and does not contain much happy talk.

Answer 2

Some Background:

While there are some very good third-party components for ASP.NET I tend to stay away from them for the open source alternative. The reason goes back to an issue I has with a chart component a few years ago. It had a bug that the company would not fix in the current version and instead wanted us to purchase an upgrade while not guaranteeing that would fix the problem.

They did offer a demo that we could not use in production (which was the only place we were getting the problem) so the problem continued until the component was replaced.

My Answer

From My experience I would recommend going with the open source alternative. I have used CKEditor and TinyMCE with success in PHP projects. CKEditor can be styled nicely and TinyMCE has tons of documentation from the millions of people who use it daily.

The greatest benefit to open source is being able to change the code to meet your needs or fix a problem specific to your environment.

My last ASP.NET MVC app required all components to be open source for the same reason as mentioned above with the end result being more stable than the previous that included some purchased components.

Hope this helps.