Quill review: a small, BSD-licensed editor with a quiet release line

What Quill is, and who it is for

Quill sits between the two ends of the rich-text category. Unlike Tiptap or Lexical, it ships an interface: a toolbar, two themes and the pickers and tooltips they need. Unlike CKEditor 5 or TinyMCE, it is permissively licensed, small, and has no commercial tier attached.

That makes it a natural fit for the modest end of rich-text requirements: comment boxes, notes fields, support replies, simple article bodies. It is the wrong fit for block-style editing with drag handles and slash menus, and for teams that want a maintained first-party binding for their framework.

The npm package name has a history worth knowing: the registry's creation date reads March 2012 because an unrelated package held the name first. Quill's own releases start at 0.19.0 in November 2014, which is the date we record.

Architecture: Deltas, formats and modules

Three concepts carry most of Quill.

Deltas are the data format. The documentation describes them as able "to describe Quill's contents and changes", so the same structure represents a stored document and an edit applied to it.

Formats define what content can exist — headers, lists, links, code blocks — and are registered through Quill's registries, which is also how custom formats are added.

Modules customise behaviour. The documented built-ins are clipboard, keyboard, history, toolbar and syntax, and the modules guide walks through building your own.

Quill 2.0, announced by Slab in April 2024, moved the source to TypeScript.

Getting started

The file from our benchmark application, unedited: eight lines to a themed editor with a toolbar.

import Quill from 'quill';
import 'quill/dist/quill.snow.css';

const quill = new Quill('#app', { theme: 'snow' });
quill.setContents([
  { insert: 'Hello editor' },
  { insert: '\n', attributes: { header: 1 } },
  { insert: 'Type here.\n' },
]);

The time-to-editor figure is not published yet. The application ran, but on a different machine from the time to first editor benchmark, and we do not put timings from two machines in one table.

Strengths

Small for what it includes. 58.7 kB gzip for the default build with both themes, lighter than Editor.js at 64.3 kB with no tools at all, and less than a sixth of TinyMCE's 393.9 kB.

Permissive licence, no upsell. BSD-3-Clause, no licence key, no hosted tier, no vendor branding in the editor we built.

A toolbar on install. Eight lines produce something a user can work with, which no headless framework offers.

Deltas. One format for documents and changes is a clean base for storing content, diffing it or applying edits from elsewhere.

Framework-agnostic. It mounts against a DOM element, so it works the same in any stack.

Limitations

No first-party framework bindings. React, Vue and Angular wrappers are all community projects, and react-quill, the best-known, has not been published since August 2022. A React team either adopts a fork or writes its own thin wrapper.

A quiet release line. 2.0.3 in November 2024 is the latest npm release. That is not proof of abandonment, but it is a risk to weigh against Tiptap or Lexical, both of which published npm releases in September 2026.

Not a block editor. No drag handles, no slash menu, no nested block model. Products that want the Notion-style experience should look at BlockNote.

Unverified areas. We could not confirm server-rendering guidance, UI localisation or AI features from Quill's documentation, so the dataset leaves those fields empty rather than guessing.

Customisation means Quill's own concepts. Deeper changes go through formats, registries and Delta handling, which is a separate mental model from the component systems most teams know.

Pricing

Free under BSD-3-Clause, with no commercial offering we could find. The costs are wrapper maintenance if you use a framework, and whatever you build beyond the default formats.

For the head-to-heads, see Quill vs Tiptap and Lexical vs Quill, and for the whole category, the rich-text editor comparison.