head to head · open source
monaco-editor vs slate
monaco-editor has 46,944 GitHub stars, 4,167 forks, 859 open issues and last shipped yesterday. slate has 31,747 stars, 3,306 forks, 653 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. monaco-editor leads on adoption by 48% (46,944 vs 31,747 stars). monaco-editor is written in JavaScript under MIT; slate is written in TypeScript under MIT. monaco-editor has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, slate 10%. monaco-editor was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (browser, editor), 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 | slate | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 32K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-28 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 3.3K |
| 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 slate if
- You want the slate feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and slate 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 slate
A completely customizable framework for building rich text editors. Why? · Principles · Demo · Examples · Documentation · Contributing! Slate lets you build rich, intuitive editors like those in Medium, Dropbox Paper or Google Docs—which are becoming table stakes for applications on the web—without your codebase getting mired in complexity. It can do this because all of its logic is implemented with a series of plugins, so you aren't ever constrained by what is or isn't in "core". You can think of it like a pluggable implementation of contenteditable built on top of React. It was inspired by libraries like…
read the full slate overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is monaco-editor or slate more popular?
monaco-editor has 46,944 GitHub stars and slate has 31,747. monaco-editor has the larger community by that measure.
Are monaco-editor and slate free?
Both are open source. monaco-editor is licensed under MIT and slate under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between monaco-editor and slate?
monaco-editor is written in JavaScript and slate in TypeScript. 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 slate?
Choose monaco-editor if you want the larger community (46,944 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose slate if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.