ChaiBuilder vs. GrapesJS
GrapesJS is a mature, open-source framework for building a drag-and-drop HTML editor. Turning it into a product your customers use means building storage, multi-tenancy, permissions, media, publishing and a Next.js rendering layer around it. ChaiBuilder ships all of that, already wired to React and Tailwind CSS.
app/editor/page.tsx
Day 2 with an editor framework
With chaipro, every TODO above ships in the package.
pnpm add grapesjs
GrapesJS is one of the most established open-source web builder frameworks. It gives you a canvas, a block manager, a CSS style manager, layer and trait panels and an undo manager, and it exports HTML, CSS and a project JSON. If you need an embeddable editor for HTML pages or email templates, it does the job well.
The trouble starts when you are building a multi-tenant SaaS platform on Next.js and React, or running dozens of customer sites.
GrapesJS is framework-agnostic by design. It knows nothing about your database, your users or your React components. The moment a customer hits Save, your engineering team's second job begins.
With GrapesJS, you are building a bespoke CMS and a rendering layer around an HTML editor. With ChaiBuilder (chaipro), you drop a complete, self-hosted website module into your Next.js app and Postgres database on Day 1.
Don't let a free editor framework turn your best product engineers into full-time CMS maintainers.
Platform capability
With GrapesJS
grapesjs
With ChaiBuilder
chaipro
Est. engineering time saved
Visual editor and canvas
GrapesJS: Included. Drag-and-drop canvas with block, layer, trait and style panels for HTML components.
chaipro: Included in chaicore. Full visual block editor with live responsive preview.
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Tailwind CSS styling UI
GrapesJS: Build it yourself. The Style Manager writes raw CSS rules per selector. Tailwind classes, design tokens and brand limits are yours to wire in.
chaipro: Ships Day 1. Native Tailwind CSS styling panel with design tokens, responsive breakpoints and dark mode.
Time saved: 4-6 weeks
Page and block storage (Postgres / SQLite)
GrapesJS: Build it yourself. The Storage Manager saves to local storage or calls endpoints you provide. You design the tables, migrations, API and query layer.
chaipro: Ships Day 1. Pages, global blocks, revisions and per-site themes stored in your own Postgres or SQLite database. SQLite page storage is already in the open-source core.
Time saved: 3-4 weeks
Multi-tenancy and routing
GrapesJS: Build it yourself. You wire up tenant isolation, custom domain mapping and per-customer data scoping.
chaipro: Ships Day 1. One install and one database serve hundreds or thousands of isolated customer sites and domains.
Time saved: 4-8 weeks
Next.js and React rendering
GrapesJS: Build it yourself. GrapesJS exports an HTML string and CSS. Rendering it in Next.js, mounting your React components and fetching server data is your job.
chaipro: Ships Day 1. Pages render in your Next.js app with Tailwind classes, and blocks can be your own React components bound to server-side data providers.
Time saved: 3-5 weeks
Revisions, drafts and publishing
GrapesJS: Build it yourself. GrapesJS keeps undo and redo for the editing session. Draft and published state, preview routes and rollback are yours to build.
chaipro: Ships Day 1. Draft-to-publish lifecycle, Next.js draft preview, full version history with one-click restore, and page locking so two editors never overwrite each other.
Time saved: 3-5 weeks
Role-based access control (RBAC)
GrapesJS: Build it yourself. GrapesJS has no users, roles or login. You build the user model and decide which panels and actions each role can reach.
chaipro: Ships Day 1. Granular roles that control who can edit copy, change styles, edit the theme, publish live or connect an AI agent.
Time saved: 2-4 weeks
S3 media manager
GrapesJS: Partly included. The Asset Manager gives you a picker, but uploads go to an endpoint you build. S3 storage, resizing and search are yours.
chaipro: Ships Day 1. Media manager on your own S3 or R2-compatible bucket, with search, cropping, inline image editing and automatically resized image variants.
Time saved: 1-2 weeks
AI and MCP server
GrapesJS: Build it yourself. Open-source GrapesJS has no MCP server. The commercial Grapes Studio offers one as a connector hosted on its own cloud.
chaipro: Ships in chaipro. A built-in Model Context Protocol (MCP) server with 33 tools (opt-in, enabled once by your developers) plus an in-builder AI chat on your own provider keys. Agents act with the user's permissions and their content edits land as drafts.
Time saved: 4-6 weeks
Multilingual and localization
GrapesJS: Build it yourself. GrapesJS translates its own editor UI, not your page content. Per-locale copies and locale routing are yours.
chaipro: Ships Day 1. Localized versions of any page, created by hand or translated by an AI agent.
Time saved: 2-3 weeks
Time estimates are indicative and vary with your stack and team.
GrapesJS was built to produce HTML and CSS, and it does that well. In a Next.js product, an HTML string is where the trouble starts: you inject it into a page, step outside your React components and server data, and rebuild SEO, routing and caching around it.
ChaiBuilder pages render inside your Next.js app with Tailwind classes. Blocks can be your own React components with typed props, so a customer's site runs on the same components and data as the rest of your product. Pages, blocks and revisions live in your own Postgres or SQLite database.
The GrapesJS Style Manager exposes raw CSS properties per selector. That is flexible, and it is also how a customer ends up with fourteen shades of blue and a broken mobile layout. Keeping every site on brand means building those limits yourself.
ChaiBuilder's styling panel works in Tailwind CSS with your design tokens (colors, fonts, spacing). You lock the brand down so sites stay on it, while power users and designers build layouts without filing engineering tickets.
Modern SaaS platforms don't just give users a drag-and-drop interface. They give them AI agents that build and update pages.
chaipro includes a built-in MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that your developers switch on once. Users and internal workflows connect with their own scoped API keys to create pages, update seasonal promos or translate content. Content, SEO and translation edits land as drafts with a preview link, and an agent can't write to a page a person already has open in the visual editor. The model runs on your own AI subscription, with no ChaiBuilder credits or markup.
A website builder inside a SaaS product shouldn't make customers re-type data your platform already holds, like product catalogs, real estate listings, clinic locations or team bios.
ChaiBuilder blocks read directly from records in your existing database or backend API through server-side data providers. When a new customer signs up, their website is populated on Day 1.
GrapesJS and chaicore are both BSD-3-Clause open source. The difference is everything that ships around the editor.
BSD-3-Clause open source
Our core visual builder is open source on GitHub, with SQLite page storage and Next.js rendering included. Inspect the code, test the canvas and see the clean Next.js and Tailwind markup it renders.
Pro license
Installs into your Next.js codebase as an npm package and adds multi-tenancy, Postgres storage, RBAC, S3 media, revisions, multilingual pages and the MCP server.
Self-hosted, always
Everything runs on your own cloud: Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, or your own Node and Docker servers. If you ever stop renewing, a lapsed license never takes a live customer site down.
Anything else, bring it to a 30-minute demo call.
No. GrapesJS has a Storage Manager that saves to the browser's local storage or calls remote endpoints you provide. You design the database schema, write those endpoints, handle draft and published state, and manage revision history. ChaiBuilder (chaipro) includes Postgres and SQLite storage out of the box, and the open-source core already stores pages in SQLite.
You can mount the GrapesJS editor in a React app, but its components are GrapesJS component types and its output is HTML and CSS. Rendering that output in Next.js with your own React components and server data is work you take on. ChaiBuilder is built for Next.js: you register your own React components with typed props, bind them to your application's data and style them with Tailwind CSS.
Hosted builders charge per site and eat into your margin as you grow. ChaiBuilder is one flat yearly license for your whole platform, with unlimited customer sites. Because it runs on your own Next.js infrastructure and database, there are no per-site fees, no per-seat pricing and no AI credit markups.
See how chaipro drops into your Next.js stack, connects to your Postgres database and lets your customers publish their own sites in weeks.
The website builder for agents and humans. Owned by you. The website module for platforms and agencies that run many sites, self-hosted on Next.js.
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