FCKEditor vs. TinyMCE

Thanks for making a special topic of this. It’s good to have a clear list with the strong and weak points of both. Although I disagree what about the output-code, because my experience is that fck deliveres valid code. Except for when people copying straight from word to the editor, most things are working fine… On the other hand, the support for safari and opera is not ready yet for fck. So if you find those browsers important too, I think tinymce is a better choise. In the coming weeks I’ll try to customize tinymce just as I want it to be and if that works out good, I think I’ll choose for tinymce, main reason: there are a few bugs in fck… But maybe they are out of it now in the newest version. Well, a much too long comment from my side again. I am really wondering how everybody’s opinion is about those the editors. I will challenge both developers (also by email in a few minutes) to defend their editor here

I actually prefer FCK over TinyMCE and I haven’t had problems with the output code, could you elaborate more on your “Very Ugly and invalid Markup” output code comment?

Worked with TinyMCE so far and will stick with it, but thanks for putting them to the test

k.

The reason why I disliked the output code is because the previous version I used still used the font tag and used the b and i tag. Which now that you bring it up I can see that it doesn’t. I will now change on this post.

Hi Brett, I’ve emailed both the developers and put the question on both forums of each of the developer-website with a link to this place, I hope we will get more reactions these days And CSS Globe picked up the discussion too, so I am sure many people will read it. We haven’t a clear answer right now which one is better, maybe they are just even good?

used to use fck and it was ok, a client needed a spellchecker so i swapped to tinyMCE and bought the additional image manager. havent looked back since, installation was easy turning functions on and off is simple. spellchecker great!

neither have very good image resizing though, i had to write this in myself so that the image could be resized in the editor but was dynamically resized for the browser.

Personally i prefer TinyMCE, beacuse of it’s ease of coustomiseation. It is a slick little editor and you can easily write your own image management pop-ups without having to buy their own.

Thanks everyone for giving your Opinion.
@Edwin - Thanks for getting this post on the forums. Hopefully we get some more opinions.

What I hate most about rich text editors is that they don’t strip the formatting of text that’s copied and pasted. I know they have toolbar buttons to do this, but a lot of users have no clue what that’s for. They have to be trained.

Still, these two are the best rich text editors out there. I mostly use TinyMCE myself.

great article
i decide to use tiny on my website http://www.guru.ua
thanks

FCKEditor has an option for this in the config file. If you set it to true, every time the user attempts to paste something into the editor a popup will appear asking the user to paste their text into the popup. The popup is a textarea that strips the content of all HTML and pastes the stripped-text into the editor.

Its great to hear from everyone.
@Ryan Rose - I believe it only works in IE.

This whole afternoon and evening I worked with TinyMCE to get it more what I want it to be and I figured out that tinymce isn’t perfect either. Actually I think they’re both even good. The only better point of tinymce is now that they got the spell-checker. FCK-editor will have that in version 2.8 too, but that will be a long time waiting I think, cause they are now in version 2.6… Another cool thing if tinymce is the filemanager, but that costs a lot of money. If that was included for free, I think the choise was easily made. For now I still haven’t made my choise…

tinymce does things like putting inside -tags; can’t really call that valid xhtml, can we?…
i don’t know about fckeditor however, will try it out now

That comparison table looks very biased towards tiny mce lol

You are saying that you have to pay for the image-upload pluing for tiny, but this is not true. You can use the iBrowser pluing (for free http://j-cons.com/downloads/) it works great. No need to buy the original one from tiny itself.

On my benchmarks, it turns out you are wrong, render time on local instance, thus not concerning download time, FCK is indeed much faster than tiny when rendering time is concerned. There are still problems IMHO, for example FCK renders much slower in firefox than in Internet Explorer or Safari.

I don’t know how you found out that FCK is less customizable, but if I need customizability, I’ll choose FCK, tiny is really not near as customizable as FCK. You can customize all aspects from toolbar and stiles and also create custom plugins that can affect rendering, and functionality of the editor. Would like to see your comment on this.

@Nicholas - Its nice to hear from you. First I’d like to say that the data in the tables are from my own personal experience and my clients experience with FCK and Tiny. I would love to see your benchmark data if you can supply it.

As for Customization, writing the same plugin that I have in Tiny for FCK took me a lot longer and was just annoying. I still use both Tiny and FCK in various projects based on what is required. It is great to hear from you and look forward to hearing back from you.

Hello, Is FCK is lighter than Tiny ?

Hi Brett!
I really enjoyed your post!
Do you know if is it possible writing plugins to do something like create a tag xml in Tiny?

apple

Can you have a button for people to incorporate RSS feeds in either FCK or Tiny? If so, do you know where I could find information on how to do so?