How Hashnode added collaboration to their text editor to sell to larger organizations

Challenge

Hashnode is a blogging and community platform for developers and technology enthusiasts. It provides a space where developers can write about their experiences, share tutorials and insights with a community of like-minded individuals. With their headless CMS provider, Hashnode has become the de-facto blogging platform for many developer tool companies.

By going after teams, it became essential for Hashnode to make their text editor collaborative. Their customers were used to Google Docs or Notion to draft blog posts together, so they needed a solution that brought all the table stakes collaborative features people are used to into their product.

Solution

Time to market was important for Hashnode. They decided to use Liveblocks to power all the collaboration features within their product: collaborative text editing, comments, and notifications.

“Working with Liveblocks was an absolute breeze. Their APIs are not only easy to use but also incredibly intuitive, making the integration process a smooth ride. We heavily rely on broadcast API to sync settings between editors and I must praise how fast and reliable the socket connection is.”

Dev ShekhawatSoftware Engineer at Hashnode

Because Hashnode already had an existing text editor powered by Tiptap, it became easy to add realtime collaborative editing to their editor thanks to Liveblocks Sync Datastore and Text Editor products.

Once collaborative editing was implemented, Hashnode started implementing comments and notifications to make aysnc collaboration seamless for their users. Within a couple of days, they leveraged Liveblocks Comments and Notifications to integrate inline comments and mentions in their text editor.

“Liveblocks has truly excelled in crafting a reliable tool with a robust infrastructure. It took us just a couple of days to integrate inline comments in our draft editor thanks to ready to use React primitives.”

Dev ShekhawatSoftware Engineer at Hashnode

Results

With Liveblocks, Hashnode was able to add all the table stakes collaborative features to their text editor in just a couple of weeks. This enabled them to sell their CMS platform to larger teams that rely heavily on collaborative features from other tools.

“At Hashnode, we prioritize managed solutions to focus on our core challenges and let experts handle the rest. Choosing Liveblocks was a no-brainer; their expertise in collaborative editing and realtime infrastructure is unmatched. Thanks to them, we shipped our real-time editing and review comments feature in record time.”

Sandeep PandaCTO at Hashnode

If you’d like to make your product collaborative, we have many open-source examples available.