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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Hocuspocus 4 – self-hosted Yjs collaboration backend

Hi HN! I'm Philip, one of the founders of Tiptap. Next to our open-source rich text editor framework, we started developing Hocuspocus about five years ago and open-sourced it too, to solve one of our biggest challenges back then: real-time collaboration in web editors. We found Yjs by Kevin Jahns, a CRDT library that handles concurrent edits without conflicts. Basically, Yjs merges changes from users without conflicts and in real-time. Hocuspocus is the WebSocket server built on top of Yjs. It handles real-time sync, presence/awareness, persistence, and Redis-based scaling. While we…

Hocuspocus 4 is a self-hosted WebSocket server that enables real-time collaboration in web applications using Yjs, a CRDT library. It handles concurrent editing without conflicts, user presence tracking, data… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Inspired by the design and UI/UX of apps like Notion, and utility of open-source apps like StackEdit, I decided to create a minimalistic, local-only WYSIWYG Markdown editor. Some features worth highlighting: - Monaco editor and Prettier integration for code snippets - Tables (apparently the holy grail of WYSIWYG editing) - Embeds (for CodePen, CodeSandbox and YouTube, most useful for HTML or JSON exports) - Accepts Markdown paste-in, and "exports"/generates HTML, Markdown and JSON outputs - Collaboration (with real-time awareness and initial commenting system, available only when…

    2023 · editor.vrite.io · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    Tiptap▲591

    Developer toolkit for building collaborative apps

    2023 · tiptap.dev · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Show HN: Tiptap Editor 3.0 Beta is out. Hi HN! Philip here from Tiptap (https://tiptap.dev/). We're excited to announce Tiptap 3.0 Beta, a major upgrade built with and for the open source community. It's still extension-based, still unopinionated, but we've tackled some of the biggest developer headaches: Enhanced TypeScript support: Strong typing for extension storage and config options. Server-side compatibility: Manipulate editor content on the server, no DOM required. JSX support: Leverage a modern, React/Vue-like approach to describing your node output. Expanded…

    2025 · tiptap.dev · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hi HN! Matrix-CRDT connects the worlds of Yjs [1] (a proven, high performance CRDT) with that of Matrix.org [2]. It started as an experiment, asking myself; can we store "state updates of a datastore" in Matrix instead of chat messages? Now, I'm convinced it's actually a really powerful combination to develop real-time, collaborative software. I'm using it for a new project and so far didn't have to write a backend yet. Matrix takes care of a lot of stuff: Authentication, E2EE, federation, hosting, etc. - so I can focus on the client. I love the ideas of Local First [3] software. Personally,…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Collaborative block-based editor → ready to drop in your app

    2025 · tiptap.dev · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    The headless rich text editor framework for web artisans. - ueberdosis/tiptap

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    I've always been curious about real-time multiplayer user interfaces. When I found out about CRDTs and Yjs[1] I thought they could serve as a solid base for a project like that. So I built this pretty simple desktop-like UI (heavily inspired by lifeat.io) and used Yjs to replicate the whole UI state among multiple peers, creating the experience of a unique interface. Try online: https://yboard.lol [1]: https://github.com/yjs/yjs

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    I am happy to announce Stalwart JMAP [1], an open-source JSON Meta Application Protocol server that aims to be scalable, robust and secure. Some of its key features are: - JMAP Core, JMAP Mail and JMAP over WebSocket full compliance. - IMAP4 rev2/1 support via Stalwart IMAP, an imap-to-jmap proxy [2]. - Scalable and fault tolerant: consensus over Raft, node autodiscovery over gossip and read-only replicas. - RocksDB backend with full-text search support in 17 languages. - OAuth 2.0 authorization code and device authorization flows. - Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) message signing. -…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9DA

    Hey HN! I’ve written a bunch of WebSocket servers over the years to do simple things like state synchronization, WebRTC signaling, and notifying a client when a backend job was run. I realized that if I had a simple way to create a private, temporary, mini-redis that the client could talk to directly, it would save a lot of time. So we created DriftDB. In addition to the open source server that you can run yourself, we also provide https://jamsocket.live where you can use an instance we host on Cloudflare’s edge (~13ms round trip latency from my home in NY). You may have seen my…

    2023 · driftdb.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    🪄 Spin up ready-to-code, disposable dev environments on your own servers. Self-hosted alternative to Gitpod and Github Codespaces. - hocus-dev/hocus

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11
    Editor.js▲723

    A block-styled editor with clean JSON output

    2019 · editorjs.io · its alternatives →

  12. 12TI

    Hi HN! My name is Nick and this is my fun side project. Please lay it on me. HN can think of Tips.io as a cracked out Tailwind Playground that has page management and amazing AI integration. There are a few core ideas: 1) The HTML is the CMS There are no fields or restrictions. Just hover, click, and start tweaking any HTML. Also, certain elements you click will have special easy edit abilities: - auto creates an uploader, stock photo picker (or HTML) - auto creates an uploader, stock video picker (or HTML) - auto creates a big icon picker (or HTML) - auto creates a WYSIWYG Editor (or HTML)…

    2024 · tips.io · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Embeddable session replay infrastructure on rrweb, the open source standard. Unbranded SDK, ingest on your domain, replay through your API. Free tier included.

    2018 · rrweb.io · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    This is an experimental extension for CRDTs, pg_crdt: GitHub repo[0]. It supports Yjs/Yrs and Automerge. The linked blog post [1] describes how we're thinking about this extension in a Supabase context. I want to emphasise this part: "pg_crdt has not been released onto the Supabase platform (and it may never be). We’re considering many options for offline-sync/support and, while CRDTs will undoubtedly factor in, we’re not sure if this is the right approach." [0] GitHub repo: https://github.com/supabase/pg_crdt [1] Blog post:…

    2022 · supabase.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15
  16. 16

    Hey HN, I'm Hakan, the founder of Colanode (https://github.com/colanode/colanode), an open-source, local-first collaboration app combining the best of Slack-style chats and Notion-style note-taking, fully self-hostable for complete data control. Here's a quick demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp1hoSCEArg As a heavy Notion user, I often found it tough to get my teams fully onboard since people naturally gravitate toward chat for quick interactions. Maintaining context between chat apps like Slack and documentation apps like Notion became increasingly…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    We're excited to announce Lowdefy V4, a full-stack web framework built on top of Next.js that simplifies building web applications, internal tools, admin panels, BI dashboards, and CRUD apps using YAML or JSON configuration files. New in V4: Next.js: Lowdefy now runs on top of the Next.js framework. All of Auth.js: App auth is now handled by Auth.js supported providers, adapters and callbacks and events, easy to configure, but all of which can be customized. Plugin extensibility: Apps can now be extended with any npm or pnpm workspace plugins. Our story: We have developed a simple…

    2021 · lowdefy.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Easily create collaborative experiences like Google Docs.

    2024 · modal.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    A realtime server for the modern web

    2016 · deepstream.io · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Easily build real-time apps that enables user collaboration

    2022 · multiplayer.dev · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    File manager + CRDT Note Editor. Contribute to notebox/nbfm development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Efficient and minimal collaborative code editor, self-hosted, no database required - ekzhang/rustpad

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    a library to create multi device experiments. Contribute to paulsonnentag/swip development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Terminal-based, hyper-fast, CRDT-backed, collaborative note-taking tool - Sambigeara/fuzzynote

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

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