TOAST UI Editor alternative (2026): what to use now that tui.editor is unmaintained
TL;DR: Inkroom is the
maintained, drop-in successor — same batteries-included philosophy, modern
ProseMirror core, one-line migration via @inkroom/toast-compat.
The situation
@toast-ui/editor still sees ~226,000 npm downloads every week, but the
repository has had no maintainer activity since August 2024 and 600+
open issues. NHN wound down the whole TOAST UI family (calendar went quiet
even earlier). Dependency CVEs now accumulate with nobody on the other end —
for anything customer-facing, staying is a security decision, not a
convenience one.
Your realistic options
| Option | Effort | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Inkroom + toast-compat | ~an hour | Maintained editor, same API surface, smaller bundle, lossless markdown |
| Fork tui.editor | permanent | 2019 architecture (custom ToastMark parser, legacy build) becomes your codebase |
| Rebuild on TipTap/Lexical | weeks–months | Excellent engines; you build toolbar, dialogs, table UI, markdown pipeline yourself |
| Do nothing | — | CVE roulette with a dead dependency |
Why Inkroom specifically
- Drop-in:
import Editor from "@inkroom/toast-compat"keeps your options, events and image hooks working;npx inkroom-migrate-toastrewrites imports and reports the rest. Full compat matrix. - Same philosophy, better engineering: batteries included, markdown first — but with a byte-level round-trip guarantee, ~2× smaller download (tui’s CSS alone is 31× Inkroom’s), an IME test suite for the Korean/Japanese input bugs tui users know too well, and dark mode / 10 languages in the box instead of separate files.
- A future: active maintenance with a public security commitment, and a sustainable business model (self-hosted Pro) funding it — the thing tui never had.
Honest differences
Inkroom’s markdown mode is a real syntax-highlighted editor, not tui’s
split preview (previewStyle is accepted and ignored, with a console
pointer). tui plugin functions don’t run as-is — code highlighting, math
and diagrams have first-party equivalents; chart/uml are roadmap.
Migration war stories and the case-study PR: docs/case-studies.