Novel — a smart editor for developers, inspired by Notion

Remember when you first tried Notion and were amazed by its convenience? Now you can embed a similar editor right into your application. Novel is an open-source WYSIWYG editor with AI support that has already gathered 15 thousand stars on GitHub.

Who will find Novel useful?

Typical use cases:

• Developers who need a rich text editor in their products
• Creators of SaaS platforms for content
• Those who want to add an AI assistant to their applications
• Notion enthusiasts who want to customize the editor to their needs

Key features that will surprise you

1. Notion-like interface — familiar blocks, drag-and-drop, markdown-like input
2. AI on board — text autocompletion via OpenAI API (suggestions, thought continuation)
3. Cross-platform — versions available for React, Svelte, and Vue
4. Production-ready — one-click deployment on Vercel
5. VSCode extension — editing right in your favorite code editor

How it works technically

Under the hood, Novel uses:

• Next.js as the foundation
• Tiptap for editor magic
• Vercel AI SDK for OpenAI integration
• TailwindCSS for styling

Example of connecting AI autocompletion:

import { useCompletion } from 'ai/react';

const { completion, complete } = useCompletion({
  api: '/api/completion',
});

Try it right now

Deploying your own copy of Novel takes just a couple of clicks:

For local development:

pnpm i
pnpm dev

Personal experience

Over the past six months, Novel has become my favorite for:

• Prototyping content editors
• Quick documentation creation
• Integrating AI assistants into client products

It's especially pleasing that the community is actively developing the project — there are already ports for Svelte and Vue, and a VSCode extension.

Verdict: is it worth trying?

Definitely yes, if:

• You need a modern editor for your project
• You want to save months of development
• You plan to use an AI assistant for text input

The project is actively developing, has an Apache 2.0 license, and a great community. The downside — it currently requires an OpenAI API key (but that's easily solved).

P.S. For inspiration, check out the demo videos from the repository:

https://github.com/steven-tey/novel/assets/28986134/2099877f-4f2b-4b1c-8782-5d803d63be5c

https://github.com/steven-tey/novel/assets/28986134/58ebf7e3-cdb3-43df-878b-119e304f7373