head to head · open source
monaco-editor vs turndown
monaco-editor has 46,944 GitHub stars, 4,167 forks, 859 open issues and last shipped yesterday. turndown has 11,501 stars, 999 forks, 144 open issues and last shipped 16 days ago. monaco-editor leads on adoption by 308% (46,944 vs 11,501 stars). monaco-editor is written in JavaScript under MIT; turndown is written in HTML under MIT. monaco-editor has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, turndown 9%. monaco-editor was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (browser), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| monaco-editor | turndown | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | HTML |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 999 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick monaco-editor if
- You weight community size — 47K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick turndown if
- You want the turndown feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches HTML
- You evaluated both and turndown fits your workflow better
About monaco-editor
Monaco Editor The Monaco Editor is the fully featured code editor from VS Code. Check out the VS Code docs to see some of the supported features. Try it out Try out the editor and see various examples in our interactive playground. The playground is the best way to learn about how to use the editor, which features is supports, to try out different versions and to create minimal reproducible examples for bug reports. Installing You will get: inside /esm : ESM version of the editor (compatible with e.g. webpack) monaco.d.ts : this specifies the API of the editor (this is what is actually versioned, everything else…
read the full monaco-editor overview →
About turndown
Turndown Convert HTML into Markdown with JavaScript. See it in action online. Project Updates to markdown has been renamed to Turndown. See the migration guide for details. Turndown repository has changed its URL to Installation npm: Browser: For usage with RequireJS, UMD versions are located in lib/turndown.umd.js (for Node.js) and lib/turndown.browser.umd.js for browser usage. These files are generated when the npm package is published. To generate them manually, clone this repo and run npm run build . Usage Turndown also accepts DOM nodes as input (either element nodes, document nodes, or document fragment…
read the full turndown overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is monaco-editor or turndown more popular?
monaco-editor has 46,944 GitHub stars and turndown has 11,501. monaco-editor has the larger community by that measure.
Are monaco-editor and turndown free?
Both are open source. monaco-editor is licensed under MIT and turndown under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between monaco-editor and turndown?
monaco-editor is written in JavaScript and turndown in HTML. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, monaco-editor or turndown?
Choose monaco-editor if you want the larger community (46,944 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose turndown if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.