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Comparison

Templatical and GrapesJS are both open source

So this is not a comparison about licences or cost — both are free, both run in your own bundle, and both can output MJML. The real question is whether you want an email editor or a framework to build one on. Everything below is checkable against public sources.

Open playgroundRead the docs

Templatical vs GrapesJS

  • Cost

    Templatical

    Free

    GrapesJS

    Free — the same

  • Licence

    Templatical

    FSL-1.1-MIT, converting to MIT two years after each release

    GrapesJS

    BSD-3-Clause — more permissive than ours today, with no restriction and no waiting period

  • Who runs the editor

    Templatical

    You, in your own bundle

    GrapesJS

    You, in your own bundle — the same

  • Source access

    Templatical

    Full source in a public repository

    GrapesJS

    Full source in a public repository — the same

  • Built for

    Templatical

    Email, and nothing else

    GrapesJS

    General web building — pages, apps, any HTML document; newsletters are one of its advertised uses

  • Email support

    Templatical

    Native. The block model is the email model.

    GrapesJS

    Through grapesjs-mjml — an official plugin from the GrapesJS org, covering 20 MJML components

  • MJML output

    Templatical

    Built in, via the MIT renderer

    GrapesJS

    Available through the grapesjs-mjml plugin

  • Merge tags

    Templatical

    Built in — picker, live labels, pluggable syntax

    GrapesJS

    Yours to build

  • Display conditions

    Templatical

    Built in, with live preview

    GrapesJS

    Yours to build

  • Reusable saved blocks

    Templatical

    Built in, over a storage provider you supply

    GrapesJS

    The Block Manager is a developer-defined palette; end users saving their own groups is yours to build

  • Test sending

    Templatical

    Built in, over a provider you supply

    GrapesJS

    Yours to build

  • Template quality linting

    Templatical

    30 accessibility, structure and link rules, MIT

    GrapesJS

    Yours to build

  • Email-client compatibility

    Templatical

    Carried by MJML — Outlook, Gmail clipping, Apple Mail

    GrapesJS

    The same, through grapesjs-mjml — it compiles with MJML too

Best fit

Which one you should pick

Neither of these is the cheap option — they are both free. This is a question of what you want to spend engineering time on. If a reason in the right column is a requirement for you, use GrapesJS; it is the better fit and we would rather you knew.

Choose Templatical if

  • You are building an email editor specifically, and want the email-shaped features to already exist.
  • You want merge tags, display conditions, saved blocks, test sending and accessibility linting without building each one.
  • You want email-shaped previews — mobile and desktop, dark mode, merge tags resolved to sample values — rather than a generic canvas preview.
  • You want a drop-in init() call rather than a canvas to assemble an editor around.
  • You want email-sensible defaults out of the box rather than a blank framework to configure.

Choose GrapesJS if

  • You need more than email — landing pages, app screens, any HTML document. Templatical does email and nothing else.
  • You want layout freedom beyond what MJML allows — accepting that you then own email-client compatibility yourself, since the MJML plugin is what provides it.
  • You need a more permissive licence. BSD-3-Clause has no non-compete restriction and no two-year wait; ours does.
  • You want to control the editor framework itself, not consume a finished product.
  • You already run GrapesJS elsewhere and would rather have one editor across every surface.

On grapesjs-mjml? Bring your templates

If your GrapesJS setup already outputs MJML, that is the format Templatical works in natively — so an evaluation can start from your real designs.

Open playgroundRead the docs
Read the MJML migration guide

Verified on 8 August 2026 against grapesjs 0.23.4 and grapesjs-mjml 1.0.8 as published on npm. This page compares the open-source framework; GrapesJS also sells Studio SDK, a commercial embedded editor whose pricing is quote-only and therefore not compared here.

“Yours to build” means the capability is not provided out of the box, not that it is hard or unsupported — GrapesJS is a framework, and building on it is the point.

Sources:grapesjs.comnpm: grapesjsnpm: grapesjs-mjml

GrapesJS is a trademark of its respective owner. This page is maintained by Templatical and is neither affiliated with nor endorsed by them.

This page is a snapshot, not a standing claim — including what we say GrapesJS does better. If anything here is out of date or wrong, open an issue.