A WYSIWYG editor — short for “What You See Is What You Get” editor — is a major asset when building or making changes to a website.

I remember when I used to toggle between code and preview screens, trying to perfect every pixel. The introduction of WYSIWYG editors — with their ability to show those changes in real-time — transformed my workflow and helped me drastically cut down on development time.

After a few days of trying and testing these tools for this article, I’ve shortlisted 20 of the best premium and free WYSIWYG HTML editors to help you find the best one for your needs.

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Don’t just take my word for it.

Before investing in a good WYSIWYG editor, you should consider whether it’s worth spending all that money. Evaluate the pros and cons first.

Here are five ways a good WYSIWYG editor can help you.

One of the most obvious benefits of using a WYSIWYG HTML editor is the ease of web development. This editor streamlines the content creation process. That’s because you don’t have to switch back and forth between an editor and the staging preview mode.

As a result, you can save time and create new pages quickly without constantly checking your code. What I appreciate about this is that it allows me to focus more of my time on creating a standout final product.

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Several WYSIWYG HTML editors offer style presets to bring more consistency to your design. These styles follow a uniform pattern of colors, fonts, spacing, and other formatting rules.

What I like to do is create my own templates to build brand consistency. This eliminates inconsistencies that inevitably show up in manually coded sites. This one is another huge time-saver but also helps keep the branding consistent.

Manually writing your website’s code can lead to missing tags, incorrect syntax, and several technical errors. But a WYSIWYG editor automatically generates the code as per your design requirements. It reduces the scope of manual errors and enhances the output.

A WYSIWYG editor offers a more intuitive and error-free experience when designing web pages.

When using a WYSIWYG editor, I like that I can instantly see how your design changes will appear on a page. You can take different actions — like adding images or videos, changing layout settings, and switching fonts — and the editor will instantly show how the content appears on the page.

This real-time feedback helps increase the efficiency of my design process and reduces the need to go back and forth between the code and the preview.

An AI HTML editor allows you to design web pages even if you aren’t familiar with HTML and CSS. It democratizes the web development process by removing technical barriers like coding skills.

For example, with an AI-powered editor, you can generate a customized web page by writing a detailed prompt about your design choices.

AI capabilities can also streamline tasks like writing content, choosing colors, enhancing design elements, and more.

Now that you know how a WYSIWYG editor can help you, let’s look at an example to better understand what these editors can do.

I’ll use Shorthand as a WYSIWYG editor example here. My first impression is that Shorthand’s editor looks like a presentation maker. So, you can create web pages the same way you would make a slide deck.

While Shorthand offers seven pre-designed themes, you can also create a custom theme with your brand colors, fonts, and other details. However, this capability is available only to paid users.

You can create a new section on your site by choosing any of these available sections. Shorthand offers a wide range of section templates for different elements like headings, quotes, timelines, maps, and more.

For example, add the “Scrollmation” section to create two columns — one with scrolling text and another with a fixed image or video.

It’s possible to edit every minute detail in a section. You can add a section name, change font sizes, modify colors, add rich embeds, and more.

Now you may be sold on trying out a WYSIWYG editor for yourself, but aren’t sure where to start. (Don’t worry, I was in the same boat!) Before testing out the tools themselves, I recommend thinking through what features you’ll need most.

Here are some tips I recommend once you’re at this stage.

Figure out what kind of app or website you plan to develop. Then, list out the integrations and coding languages you'll need the editor to work with.

When I first started, I underestimated the power of integrations. I remember working on a project that required seamless integration with various APIs, and the editor I initially chose couldn't keep up.

That experience taught me to always start by listing out the specific functionalities, coding languages, and integrations essential for my projects. It's crucial that your editor aligns with the architecture of your website or app.

Structured markup can help search engines process and understand your content, so this is another feature I recommend looking for.

In one project, I focused solely on aesthetics and neglected structured markup. The site looked great but performed poorly in search rankings. Since then, I've always looked for editors that support SEO-friendly practices.

Remember, it‘s not just about how your website looks, but also about how it’s understood and ranked by search engines.

I've also learned that going beyond standard templates is essential for creating a distinctive online presence.

An editor that offers extensive customization capabilities allows you to tailor the user experience to your audience‘s needs. It can turn your website into a reflection of your brand’s personality.

The right WYSIWYG editor can help you create a unique look and user experience for every user in your audience.

Efficiency is everything. Features like advanced code pasting, a straightforward interface, and collaboration tools have been lifesavers for me in meeting tight deadlines.

For example, I worked on a project where collaborative editing features allowed my team to work simultaneously on different parts of the site, dramatically speeding up the development process.

Before I share my review of the 20 best WYSIWYG HTML editors, save this handy checklist of features to look for in all the options you explore.

A handy toolbar allows you to make quick changes anywhere on your page. You can access text formatting and styling options to customize the font style, color, size, and more.

You’ll also get alignment options to check whether your text and images appear in the desired order across different sections of a page. Plus, this toolbar will include options to add an embed, a divider, a table, and similar elements.

For example, this toolbar includes three main segments: font settings, alignment, and adding new elements.

The editing panel decides the effectiveness of an HTML editor. This is essentially where you can add, style, and review your content in real time.

Look for a drag-and-drop editor to add images, text, multimedia, and other sections easily. You can make any type of change by simply dragging and dropping your desired elements into your webpage.

The preview mode is arguably one of the most important features of a WYSIWYG editor. It allows you to view your webpage across different devices and make adjustments to create a responsive design.

Instead of manually testing your site on multiple devices, your HTML editor’s preview mode will visualize your page on different screen sizes.

Here’s how you can preview your webpage designs for several devices:

Designing websites is a tedious process — I know. You can naturally make mistakes and tap a button that you didn’t want to use. That’s why a simple undo button can quickly fix the problem before it becomes a bigger blunder.

The undo/redo buttons are also useful for experimentation. Easily make changes to your webpage and reverse the unwanted changes using the undo button. Then, re-apply them, if necessary, with the redo button.

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Adobe Dreamweaver CC is a code editor that can handle CSS, PHP, XHTML, JSP, JavaScript, and XML development. It comes with a fluid grid layout and a multiscreen preview panel. These features help developers fix various screen compatibility issues.

With built-in templates, layouts, and an easy-to-use interface, Dreamweaver makes designing a website relatively simple.

I think the learning curve can be intimidating for beginners, so it's best suited to professional web developers and designers. However, Adobe's tutorials can help beginners get started.

Dreamweaver CC is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. So, you can pay for a Cloud account to get monthly or annual access.

Froala is a lightweight WYSIWYG HTML editor written in JavaScript. It includes built-in rich text capabilities and extensions via Froala's API and server-side SDKs. Froala has a clean design, and I found it quite easy to set up.

This tool‘s learning curve isn’t steep. That’s why I consider it an appealing option for users who want to start working on their projects quickly.

Among development teams, Froala is a top pick because of its unique, real-time collaborative editing feature. This tool offers detailed documentation, powerful framework plugins, and many examples. This makes it simple to integrate Froala into the existing technological infrastructure.

Also, I found that the rich text editor — which initializes in 40 milliseconds — provides a great editing experience on any application.

Setka Editor is a content editing platform with a no-code WYSIWYG editor and a channel-agnostic framework. This allows remote teams of any size to collaborate on content design projects and put decisions in place quickly.

Setka helps development teams efficiently deliver delightful and engaging content experiences with their content layouts and strong support.

CoffeeCup HTML Editor is a feature-rich editor designed to create websites quickly. With this editor, you’ll get intuitive tools like code completion, which automatically suggests tags as you type.

This WYSIWYG editor also includes a components library where you can save elements that you reuse, like a header and footer. That way, you only have to edit those elements once to update them instantly across all pages on your site.

You’ll also get access to free and fully responsive templates that you can import into the editor in just two clicks.

This editor gave me plenty of live preview options. I chose the split-screen preview so I could see my web page displayed right below my code.

If you prefer, you can also use the external preview to display your page in another window or on a second monitor. Either option shows you exactly what your design will look like as you work.

AppMaster is a cutting-edge platform that revolutionizes the way web and mobile applications are developed. Distinct from traditional code-based editors, it offers a unique approach to app creation through automation.

AppMaster is designed to cater to both novice and seasoned developers, streamlining the app development process with its powerful automation tools.

Shorthand is a standout platform designed to create immersive, visually captivating stories on the web. This tool is particularly favored by content creators, marketers, and journalists who aim to engage their audience through rich multimedia narratives.

I found that Shorthand excels in transforming traditional text-based content into interactive, visually appealing stories without the need for extensive coding skills.

Pinegrow is a powerful web editor that stands out for its robust features catered to responsive web design. It’s a go-to tool for both front-end developers and designers who seek an efficient way to build and edit websites.

Pinegrow is especially notable for its ability to work with live multi-page editing, CSS & SASS styling, and smart components for Bootstrap, Foundation, and WordPress.

uCoz is a versatile web-building platform that caters to a wide range of users, from beginners to advanced webmasters. It stands out for its balance of user-friendly website creation tools and advanced customization options.

Ideal for creating blogs, personal websites, and even e-commerce sites, uCoz provides a flexible environment where you can start with a template and then dive into code for deeper customization.

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Webflow is a cutting-edge design tool that empowers designers to build professional, responsive websites without any coding knowledge. It’s a popular choice among designers who want to translate their visual ideas into fully functional websites.

Webflow stands out to me for its visual canvas, allowing intricate design customization while automatically generating HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Hostinger is renowned in the web hosting industry for its affordable and user-friendly web hosting services. It's a top choice for individuals and businesses looking to host their websites reliably and efficiently.

Hostinger stands out for its easy-to-use interface, fast loading times, and excellent customer support, making it a preferred option for those starting their website journey or looking to switch hosting providers.

HubSpot’s WYSIWYG editor comes built-in within the Content Hub. The visual page editor makes it easy to design websites and preview your designs effortlessly, whether you're an advanced developer or new to coding.

HubSpot’s no-code editor lets you easily create custom design elements. Or you can choose from available modules, sections, and layouts to customize your website/landing pages.

The tool also offers pre-made templates for setting up a website quickly, even if you don’t have a vision in mind. You can also optimize your site for search engines with automated recommendations to fix certain issues. The tool explains each recommendation in detail with steps to implement it.

This editor combines rich site development features with a powerful all-in-one CRM experience. Often, adding one more tool to your tech stack means updates and changes you’ll need to adjust to.

However, this free tool creates a consistent experience across its tools for marketing, sales, content management, and customer service.

CKEditor is a browser-based HTML editor with a minimal and user-friendly interface. Creating a landing page with this tool is as seamless as working on a Google Doc. You can collaborate with multiple users by leaving comments and tracking changes across different versions.

You can also use CKEditor as a plugin within website builders and bring necessary content processing features to the web.

The AI assistant is one of the standout features of this WYSIWYG editor. You can leverage the power of AI models from OpenAI and Azure to enhance your website content. Use predefined prompts or create your custom input, and the AI assistant will help you generate and improve content.

CKEditor’s other benefits include fast loading (which saves development time) and the ability to change projects on the fly without manually editing and uploading them to your server.

Editor.js is an open-source, block-styled editor that allows you to create a web page with design and text blocks. You can move around and reorder these blocks to customize your output. This tool works similarly to WordPress's Gutenberg editor.

When you click on a design block, you see the specific options available for editing and enhancing it. Similarly, when you click on text content, options for text formatting and inline styles appear.

For example, you can add different types of headers, bulleted/numbered lists, tables, checklists, and more elements in a context block.

You can extend Editor.js and use it as a plugin, thanks to its application programming interface (API). It also returns clean data in the JSON output format. That means you can do way more with the data. You can render with HTML for web clients, render natively for mobile apps, create markup for Facebook Instant Articles or Google AMP, or generate an audio version for screen readers.

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TinyMCE is the rich-text editor behind many products, including Evernote, Atlassian, and Medium. The WYSIWYG editor enables developers to build beautiful web pages and platforms.

TinyMCE also offers an AI Assistant plugin. With this plugin, you can connect any AI model of your choice to the TinyMCE editor via API and use this model within your design process.

The tool is easy to integrate into your preferred tool. You can deploy it in cloud-based, self-hosted, or hybrid environments.

The setup allows you to incorporate frameworks such as Angular, React, and Vue. You can also extend this tool with over 50 plugins, each with over 100 customization options.

TinyMCE gives you full control of your design with functions for creating and editing tables, establishing font families, searching and replacing fonts, and changing font size.

It also provides several cloud security features, including JSON web tokens and private RSA keys to better secure your content.

Bubble is a no-code editor for building fully functional web applications. Its robust point-and-click editor allows you to create and customize web apps — whether they’re simple prototypes, sophisticated SaaS products, or entire marketplaces.

Bubble's user-friendly interface makes building and customizing applications simple and quick.

I think this tool is particularly helpful for non-tech-savvy users because you can quickly pick components from a built-in library and bring your vision to life.

Here’s an example where I explored different components in Bubble’s template library:

Bubble also offers an AI toolkit to make app development a more efficient, hassle-free, and powerful experience. Here are a few AI-powered tools you can use:

The tool also has an AI page designer that creates landing pages using a combination of pre-built templates and your input.

You can also choose to incorporate logic into workflow programs to determine what happens as users go through your application and click on different elements.

Lastly, Bubble integrates readily with any service that displays the REST API. These integrations include Facebook, Google Analytics, SQL, and many payment applications.

Quill is a free, open-source WYSIWYG editor built with extension and customization in mind.

Thanks to its modular architecture and expressive API, you can start with Quill core. Then, customize its modules or add your own extensions to this rich text editor as needed.

The tool provides two themes for changing the look of the editor, which you can personalize with plugins or by overriding rules in its CSS stylesheet.

Quill also supports any custom content and format, so you can add embedded slide decks, interactive checklists, 3D models, and more. Since the editor can support richer and more interactive content, it’s used for small projects and giant Fortune 500 companies alike.

Summernote is a simple WYSIWYG editor that you can load with Bootstrap and jQuery or jQuery only.

Once configured and installed properly, your Summernote rich text editor will include buttons. These can help you add an image, link, video, or table, change the font names, sizes, and formatting, and more.

You can customize and extend this editor with modules and plugins. For example, you can customize the toolbar, set the breaking level of block quotes, pick custom font size units and line heights, and much more.

ContentTools is an open-source WYSIWYG editor you can add to any HTML page in just a few steps.

Once added, you’ll see a pencil icon on the HTML page. When clicked, a toolbox and inspector bar appear. Using these two elements, you can edit, resize, or drag and drop text images, embedded videos, tables, and other content within the page.

You can use the ContentTools editor out of the box. It’s also easy to customize it to allow only certain regions of the page to be editable and to specify which CSS styles users can apply to elements.

This drag-and-drop editor is great for beginners without core design skills. You can use this HTML editor like a no-code website builder and create pages quickly.

Brackets is a modern, lightweight open-source editor that began as an Adobe project. It's simple to use and customize, with a wide range of extensions and plug-ins.

One of Brackets’s most popular features is the live preview, which lets you see HTML and CSS code changes as you make them. You can use the inline editor to avoid switching between different tabs, and by going to a specific line, you can instantly preview any part of your page or code.

I liked that this tool simplifies the coding process with its “Working Files” list on the left panel. Instead of moving between tabs, this editor lets you quickly move between and edit different files on the list.

Vev is designed for developers, designers, and marketers alike. This platform masterfully blends editing tools for no-code and code use cases.

I would say it's the tool you turn to when you don’t want your creativity boxed in by traditional web development constraints.

With Vev, you can bring the most ambitious web concepts to life. It stands out for giving both creative and technical minds equal playgrounds.

Designers can unleash their creativity without hindrance, while developers can dive deep into the code, ensuring that every pixel and function aligns with the project's vision.

Interestingly, Vev offers a well-structured library of learning resources. You can browse these mini-courses, how-to guides, and tutorials to understand the platform. This learning hub makes it easier for users of different skill levels to fully adopt the tool.

A WYSIWYG HTML editor can truly transform your web development process. Instead of getting stuck in the loop between your code and the preview mode, you can create and view your content simultaneously.

I’ve reviewed 20 of the best free and premium WYSIWYG HTML editors, each with its own strengths. But the real magic happens when you find the one that resonates with your project.

So, explore and experiment before choosing the tool that makes your life easier and drives innovation.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in April 2024 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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