# ProseMirror

16 Hacker News commenters recommended ProseMirror and 6 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended as a well-designed rich text toolkit that gives many editing features for free. Common caveat: awkward to use directly in React.

## Why people recommend it

- Well designed and carefully built (4 comments): "ProseMirror (especially ProseMirror, in our opinion!) are all excellent rich text libraries" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47428750)) "ProseMirror and seemingly WordGard have real thought and care put into them" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48776671)) "ProseMirror (and presumably Wordgard) just gets so much right." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48780642))
- Backbone of web editors (3 comments): "Shout out to Yjs, ProseMirror and BlockNote on which we relied to build LaSuite Docs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926382)) "CodeMirror and ProseMirror are impressive works and my current go-to libraries" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48030880)) "Prosemirror over the years has become the backbone of editors on the web." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48774199))
- Editing niceties come for free (2 comments): "get pretty much every text editing nicety for free" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172210)) "Prosemirror does this for you, if you want it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47395826))
- Good base for custom apps (2 comments): "I've been building my own writing app for a different purpose over the last month and have been pretty happy with PM" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47381069)) "you have really cool tools you can use as a foundation for something like this" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46825459))

## What people warn about

- Messy, hard-to-simplify change model (2 comments): "I've always wondered why prosemirror's transactions & steps couldn't be simplified further" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48775867)) "I'll be the first to admit that ProseMirror's change representation is a bit messy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47423164))
- Missing features out of the box (3 comments): "had a very hard time researching and implementing an @-style remote resource completion" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48773763)) "ProseMirror doesn't provide virtualization out of the box." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48346591)) "Prosemirror doesn't really have any mechanism to do this" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48776107))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Wordgard](https://hackerapproved.com/p/wordgard.md): 10 recommend
- [Lexical](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lexical.md): 9 recommend
- [Tiptap](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tiptap.md): 8 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "ProseMirror", https://hackerapproved.com/p/prosemirror/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).