What is Tiptap and why should you care

Tiptap is an open-source framework for building rich-text editors that has amassed over 32,000 stars on GitHub in the last three years and went through the Y Combinator accelerator (batch S23). Unlike ready-made editors like CKEditor or Quill, Tiptap is "headless" — it provides the logic, interface, and infrastructure, but each developer defines the look and behavior themselves. This is why companies like Mintlify, DocsHound or DuckBook use it to build Notion-style editor experiences.

The editor is built on the ProseMirror library and licensed under MIT, meaning it is completely free. The commercial Tiptap platform offers add-ons: real-time collaboration, comments, version management, document conversion, and now the AI Toolkit. Pricing starts at 59 dollars per month (annual tier $49), which includes 500 cloud documents, two developer licenses, and basic AI functionality.

Why "AI in documents" is so hard

Anyone can build a chatbot these days. What's much harder is teaching AI to meaningfully edit a structured document. Rich text is not plain text — it's a tree of nodes, tables, images, buttons, and interactive elements. When a user says "edit the third paragraph," the AI must recognize exactly what the third paragraph is within the document structure, avoid breaking surrounding content, and ideally show its changes as suggestions for approval.

And that's just the beginning. What if the user overwrites the document during AI editing? What if another person is typing in the same spot in real time? Or another AI agent? Microsoft research from 2025 further showed that even the most powerful models damage documents during complex edits — so-called "document corruption," where an LLM inadvertently breaks the structure, deletes a table, or rearranges blocks.

Tiptap has been working on this for over a year. The result is the AI Toolkit — a set of tools that solves these problems once and for all.

AI Toolkit: a bridge between the AI agent and the document

The AI Toolkit is not another chatbot or "AI assistant in the editor." It's a set of functions that you pass to your own AI agent as tools. It works with any model and framework — OpenAI SDK, Anthropic SDK, Vercel AI SDK, LangChain, or your own implementation. Tiptap doesn't meddle in your AI logic; you retain full control over your agent loop, models, and infrastructure.

Server-side editing — no browser required

A key innovation is that the AI Toolkit runs on the server. This means the AI agent can edit a document even after the user closes the browser. You can run long AI workflows overnight, perform bulk edits on hundreds of documents, or let an agent work in the background while the team sleeps. Changes propagate to the editor via the Tiptap Collaboration service — the same way another human colleague's typing does.

Document awareness and precise edits

The AI Toolkit understands document structure — it knows what a table is, what a row is, what a heading is, and what a regular paragraph is. For each document, it generates a schema description (system prompt string) that explains to the AI agent how individual elements are encoded. Thanks to this, the user can select specific text and ask the AI to edit just that part — precisely, without lengthy verbal descriptions of the position.

For large documents, the toolkit reads content in chunks — the developer sets the chunk size themselves. Tiptap is also working on dedicated search tools to help AI navigate extensive texts without overflowing the context window.

Smart Diff and Tracked Changes

One of the most technically impressive parts of the AI Toolkit is a completely new diff algorithm for structured documents. Ordinary diff tools compare strings of characters — this one compares trees of nodes, including their attributes, positions, and relationships.

As a result, every change the AI makes can be displayed by the Toolkit as a suggestion for approval. The user sees exactly what changed, who made the change (a human or a specific AI agent), and can accept or reject it — similar to Google Docs, but with 100% AI integration.

There is also a Split View that shows the document before and after the edit side by side, and streaming, where AI changes "flow" into the document character by character in real time.

Tiptap Shorthand: up to 80% token savings

A feature marked as "alpha" promises dramatic cost reduction. Tiptap Shorthand is a compressed format for encoding documents that reduces token consumption by up to 80% without loss of accuracy. At a time when API call costs still make up a significant line item in AI project budgets, this is a substantial competitive advantage.

Pricing and availability: free giveaway for the first 100

The AI Toolkit is sold as a paid add-on to the Tiptap platform — pricing is determined individually through the sales department. Tiptap justifies this by saying that every deployment scenario is different and a flat price list wouldn't make sense. A free trial is available (30 days, no credit card required).

To mark the beta launch, Tiptap is running a giveaway for 100 developers: just sign up at cloud.tiptap.dev/waitlist/ai-toolkit-launch for a chance at a lifetime free license with a limit of 100,000 tool-calls per month. The only condition is providing product feedback.

Beyond the giveaway, Tiptap also offers enterprise solutions including on-premise deployment on your own infrastructure, which is crucial for regulated industries like banking, healthcare, or government.

European footprint: why this matters for Czech developers

Tiptap is developed by the German team at Überdosis — making it a European product that complies with GDPR and offers hosting on EU servers. For Czech companies and startups dealing with European legislative compliance (including the AI Act), this is a significant advantage over American alternatives like Liveblocks or Velt. The platform is also SOC 2 Type II certified, which eases deployment in enterprise environments.

The AI Toolkit is framework-agnostic and independent of any specific AI provider — you don't have to be tied to OpenAI or Google. You can use any model, including open-source Llama or Mistral, even locally hosted variants. For European companies that don't want to send data to the US for security or regulatory reasons, this is a crucial flexibility.

Comparison with the competition

There are several tools on the market operating in a similar space:

Liveblocks offers ready-made AI copilots and collaboration infrastructure, but it's a more closed solution — less flexibility for custom AI logic. Velt focuses on rapid integration of collaboration features, but AI capabilities are still limited. ProseMirror, which Tiptap is built on, is powerful but raw — lacking the AI layer, collaboration, and UI components that Tiptap adds.

Tiptap AI Toolkit's main competitive advantage lies in the combination of an open editor (MIT license), headless approach, and proprietary AI infrastructure. No one else today offers a comparable solution for "in-document AI editing" that is simultaneously framework-agnostic, server-side, and production-ready.

As for limitations: the AI Toolkit is in beta, and some features like Tiptap Shorthand and change streaming are still in alpha. It also doesn't yet support restricting agent access to only certain parts of a document (e.g., protecting specific sections from AI editing) — but this feature is on the roadmap.