CodeX
Rutba Office vs Editor.js
A free, Apache-2.0 block-style editor for the web. Content is a list of typed blocks serialised as JSON, extended by plugins. It is not an office-format editor and does not set out to be one.
Ours is the free one, so read this knowing whose page you are on. What follows starts with where Editor.js beats us, because on this page that is the part you cannot get from them.
First, honestly
Where Editor.js wins
Not a courtesy paragraph. Each of these is a real reason to choose them over us.
A permissive licence, and a small one
Apache 2.0 against AGPL — it goes into a closed product with no conversation and no commercial licence. It is also a fraction of the size of a document engine, because it is doing a fraction of the job.
The right model for web content
Clean JSON out, one block at a time, with a good plugin ecosystem. For a CMS, a comment box or an article editor that is a far better fit than a word-processing document model, and we would not argue otherwise.
Mature and widely deployed
Years of production use, a real community, and plugins for most of what people ask an editor to do.
And ours
Where Rutba Office wins
It is a different job, and that is the honest comparison
Editor.js produces JSON blocks. It does not open a .docx, does not save one, and has no concept of styles, sections, tracked changes or pagination. If what you need is a web content editor, nothing in our engine substitutes for it — and if what you need is to open the file a client sent you, it is not a candidate at all.
A document model, not a block list
Runs, paragraph and character formatting, styles, sections, comments, tracked changes and page geometry — the things a word processor has to model because the format has them.
Fidelity on the way back out
The round trip is the point here: a document opened and saved returns the parts we did not touch byte-for-byte. A block editor has no round trip to preserve, because it never had the original.
Side by side
The seven structural questions
Asked of editors and engines you build with. A component and a desktop suite are not decided on the same seven, so each group has its own.
| Question | Rutba Office | Editor.js |
|---|---|---|
| Free in productionUsable in a shipping product at no cost | Yes | Yes |
| Source publishedYou can read and change the code | Yes | Yes |
| Microsoft formatsReads and writes .docx, .xlsx or .pptx as such | Yes | No |
| Runs server-sideWorks in Node with no browser and no DOM | Yes | No |
| Preserves what it does not understandA round trip returns untouched parts byte-for-byte | Yes | No |
| Closed-source embeddingA licence exists that permits it without publishing your source | Partly | Yes |
| A whole suite above itDocuments, sheets, slides and mail from the same codebase | Yes | No |
These seven are the questions this project was built to answer, so of course it answers them. Feature depth, maturity, collaboration and support contracts are not on this table, and Editor.js beats us on at least one of those.
Verdict
Who should choose which
Not really a competitor, and pretending otherwise is how comparison pages become worthless. Use Editor.js for web content in a browser — it is better at that than anything we make. Use ours when the artefact is a file somebody else will open in Word.
Model-level descriptions from CodeX’s published licensing and product structure, as of 8 September 2026. No prices are reproduced here — check editorjs.io for those.
It costs nothing to find out
Install it beside whatever you use now — a normal per-user install, a normal uninstall.