Froala is a lightweight WYSIWYG HTML editor written in JavaScript with built-in rich text capabilities and rapid extension. It has a clean design and is known to be easy to set up. The learning curve to master the use of this tool isn’t steep, making it appealing to 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. Thanks to detailed documentation, powerful framework plugins, and many examples, Froala seamlessly integrates with existing technological infrastructure.
Also, the rich text editor — which initializes in 40 milliseconds — provides a great editing experience on any application.
Highlights:
- Developer(s) – Froala Labs
- Stable release – January 13, 2020
- Written in – JavaScript
- Type – HTML editor, online rich-text editor
- License – 3 licenses: Basic License (up to 3 domains), Pro License (unlimited domains), and Enterprise License (unlimited domains).
- Website – https://froala.com/
Key Features:
1. General Information
- Easy to Integrate : The editor can be integrated in any kind of projects in no time. It requires only basic javascript and HTML coding knowledge.
- Popular : Our editor is highly appreciated among developers and it has plugins for the most popular development Frameworks.
- Easy to Upgrade : Keep all your customizations separated from the editor folder and upgrading is just a matter of downloading the new version.
- High-Quality Code : For us high quality code means LTFCE, in other words: Legible, Testable, Flexible, Compliant and Economical.
- Unit Tests: We know you hate testing and want a product that really works, so most of the editor’s functionality is covered by unit tests.
- Inline Editing: We managed to achieve the best editing experience ever. Using the inline editor, what you see is actually what you get.
- Shortcuts : Functionality at your fingertips, shortcuts allow you to activate specific commands by using only the keyboard.
- Cross Browser: Are you an Apple fan? Or Microsoft? It doesn’t matter, our editor will work the same on Safari, Internet Explorer and other browsers.
- Cross-Platform : It’s tested! A busy day won’t stop you from editing your website. Use your tablet or even smartphone for it.
2. Design
- Modern Design: We carefully analysed the latest industry trends and designed a nice modern interface that the users will just love.
- Retina Ready: Why Retina? More detail, better aesthetics and sharper fonts. Otherwise, millions of users will think your website is ugly.
- Themes: The editor will fit on any website. Use the default or the dark theme, or create your own theme using the LESS theme file.
- Intuitive Interface: Froala rich text editor offers complete functionality through a very intuitive interface that users will find natural to use.
- Popups: Modern all the way. Froala dumps the old and classic popups, adding in new, styled popups for an awesome user experience.
- SVG icons: The editor uses in-house made SVG icons, scalable vectorial icons that look gorgeous at any size.
- Custom Style: Our WYSIWYG HTML editor is the only one that has a special customizer tool to change the look and feel the way you want.
- Custom Toolbar: Too many buttons? Perhaps not in the right order? You have full control over the editor’s toolbar functionality on each screen size.
- Custom All The Way: The editor was designed for any user. Everything can be customized or custom made: buttons, dropdowns, popups, icons, shortcuts.
- Sticky Toolbar: To ease your editing experience the WYSIWYG editor’s toolbar will remain at the top of the screen while you scroll down.
- Toolbar Offset: The rich text editor’s toolbar does not have to overlap with the header on your webpage, just set an offset for it.
- Toolbar At The Bottom: Easily change the WYSIWYG HTML editor toolbar’s position from top to bottom, while also using the sticky toolbar or an offset.
- Full Screen: Dealing with large amounts of content requires a large editing space. The fullscreen button will expand the editing area to the whole webpage space.
- Full Page: Writing and editing an entire HTML page is also possible. Helpful for emails, but not only, the usage of HTML, HEAD, BODY tags and DOCTYPE declaration is permitted.
- Iframe: The WYSIWYG HTML editor’s content can be isolated from the rest of the page using iframe so there is no style or script conflicts.
3. Performance
- Fast: Six times faster than the blink of an eye, our rich text editor will initialize in less than 40ms.
- Lightweight: With its gzipped core of only 50KB, you can bring in an amazing editing experience to your app without losing loading speed.
- Plugin Based: The modular structure makes our WYSIWYG HTML editor more efficient, easier to understand, extend and maintain.
- Multiple Editors on a Page: One or ten text editors on the same page? You won’t feel a difference, just set them to be initialized on click.
- HTML 5: Froala Rich Text Editor is built respecting and taking advantage of the HTML 5 standards.
- CSS 3: What better way to improve user experience than using CSS 3? Subtle effects makes the editor even greater.
4. Optimized for Mobile
- Android and iOS: We know how used mobile devices are and we are running tests on both Android and iOS devices.
- Image Resize: Froala Rich Text Editor is the first WYSIWYG HTML editor with image resize that works even on mobile devices.
- Video Resize: We are the first to introduce resize for videos even when they are playing. And of course we made it work on mobile too.
- Responsive Design: The content you are editing will be responsive. Our WYSIWYG HTML editor can handle image resize using percentages.
- Toolbar by Screen Size: For the first time in a rich text editor, the toolbar can be customized for each screen size.
5. SEO
- Clean HTML: We developed an algorithm that automatically cleans up the HTML output of our rich text editor. Write with no worries, the WYSIWYG HTML editor produces a very clean output, waiting to be crawled by search engines.
- Image Alternative: Image alternative is the text shown if the browser can’t display the image. It is also text that search engines use, so don’t ignore it. Alternative text can be set in the edit image popup.
- Link Title: Although link title is not known to have a major SEO impact, it helps users to navigate easier through your website. Not so important, but good to have. Set the link title in the link popup.
6. Formatting
- Basic Styling: Basic styling, such as bold and italic, is built-in the main code. Perfect when you need a simple WYSIWYG HTML editor.
- Advanced Styling: More advanced styling options are also available through plugins. You just have to include the ones you need.
- Class Styling: Customize how the editor’s output looks like. Define your own style classes for paragraphs, images, links and table cells.
- Font: As opposed to most rich text editors, Froala WYSIWYG HTML editor is not using the <font> tag at all.
- Font Size: Change font size with pixel precision. No more “small”, “medium”, “large” and nothing between them.
- Font Family: Give your text some personality using different font family from your custom list of available fonts.
- Paragraph Format: Use normal paragraphs, write some code or just highlight ideas using headings.
- Colorful: Give your thoughts some color. Change the text or background color as you wish, selecting from your color palette.
- Undo & Redo: Let’s paraphrase Alexander Pope: “To err is human, to forgive, undo.” , so don’t worry about errors there’s always undo and redo.
- Selection Details: A glance at the editor’s toolbar is enough to see your current font family, font size and paragraph format.
- Line Breaker: The line breaker makes it possible to enter a new line after a table even if it is the last element in the editor.
- Subscript & Superscript: With subscript and superscript our rich text editor introduces basic math editing capabilities.
7. Rich Content
- Advanced Linking: Easily insert web links and email links. Use advanced settings to open them in new tabs or specify a predefined list of links to choose from.
- Plain Text Paste: Get rid of unwanted styling when pasting from external sources. Tell the Froala Rich Text Editor to always paste data from clipboard as plain text.
- Paste from Microsoft Office: Users paste a lot from Word and Excel. Froala WYSIWYG HTML Editor cleans all the unnecessary code and makes the HTML just look good.
- Images: Images are processed 60,000 times faster than text. Drag & drop, browse or paste a URL to insert an image.
- Image Editing: Drag & drop images to reposition them, click to resize, change their alignment, make them links, replace or delete them.
- Image Manager: The Image Manager helps you to easily browse through, insert or delete images on your own server.
- Video URL parsing: Easily insert videos by URL. Our rich text editor automatically parses Youtube, Vimeo, Yahoo and DailyMotion video links.
- Embedded Video Code: Have a different video source? No problem, you can also insert videos by pasting the embedded code into the rich text editor.
- Video Edit: Resize, change video alignment, remove or preview it directly from the editor’s interface without having to leave the page.
- File Upload: Drag & Drop any file to upload it or use the specially designed popup for handling file upload.
- Tables: Keep your data organized using tables, with both basic and advanced operations on cells, rows and columns.
- Table Cell Selection: Froala rich text editor comes with a special table cell selection feature that offers users the same experience in any browser.
- Table Resize: The table might not necessarily need the whole webpage width and not all columns are the same. Resize them for a neat appearance.
- Table Editing: The table edit popup offers an easy and intuitive way to edit the entire table, one or multiple cells.
- TAB Key in Table: Use the TAB key to jump through table cells or insert a new row if TAB is pressed in the last table cell.
- Emoticons: Express your emotions easier with emoticons rather than words. Very desired by users and possible in the Froala WYSIWYG Editor.
- Quote: With multiple quote levels, our rich text editor successfully handles different cases where quoting is required.
- Horizontal Line : Use horizontal rules to separate your edited content and split it into pages when the content is printed.
8. Accessibility
- 508 Compliant: The Froala Javascript rich text editor is compliant with Section 508 Accessibility Program.
- WCAG 2.0 Compliant: Our WYSIWYG HTML editor follows the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.
- WAI-ARIA Compliant: A beautiful user interface with increased accessibility, thanks to the WAI-ARIA specifications.
- Tab Key: Our WYSIWYG HTML editor does not interfere with the natural Tab key behavior allowing you to easily navigate through pages.
- Shortcuts: Intuitive shortcuts enable a faster editing experience and you can even forget about your mouse.
- Keyboard Navigation: You will never be constraint by using a mouse. Our WYSIWYG HTML editor is completely keyboard navigable.
9. Developers
- Powerful API: Froala WYSIWYG HTML editor comes with a powerful javascript API that allows you to easily customize and interact with the editor.
- Rich Documentation: A powerful API that comes with a complete documentation is what all developers dream to play around with.
- Autosave: Don’t worry about data loss. Our rich text editor automatically makes a save request to your server as the user types.
- Code View: Some users may think they’re faster writing HTML. Let them see and edit the HTML code behind their content.
- Code Mirror: Froala WYSIWYG Editor is offering an enhanced HTML code editing experience thanks to Code Mirror.
- Customizable Functionality: The editor’s functionality is highly customizable. Use the API to change the default behavior or edit the source code.
- Extendable: Specific websites may require specific features. Easily create a plugin to extend the Froala WYSIWYG HTML Editor’s functionality.
- Enter Control: You may customize the native browser enter behavior and we make sure that new lines are always created the same way.
- Ajax Ready: Never leave the page. With built-in AJAX mechanism for saving and uploading files you won’t have to refresh the page at all.
- HTML Entities: Reserved characters in HTML must be replaced with character entities and the entities list used by the editor is customizable.
10. International
- Languages: Froala WYSIWYG HTML editor is used world wide in various languages. For the moment 34 languages are supported.
- Spell Check: Disabled by default, it can easily be enabled. Spell check uses the browser spell check and can always come in handy.
- RTL Support: The editor has full RTL support. Writing in Arabic or Farsi will feel natural. Even the toolbar changes to give it the perfect feel.
- Auto Direction: Froala WYSIWYG HTML editor automatically detects if the keyboard input is RTL or LTR and adjusts text direction.
If you want to explore more about Text Editor or WYSIWYG Editor, We recommend you to go through our detailed article of HTML Editors.
