26.2k stars · BSD-3-Clause · v0.23.6 (2026-08-26) · Track this in Scout
Drag-and-drop builder for landing pages and, through its newsletter preset, email-safe table HTML.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
A framework for building visual web editors: you embed it in a page and get a canvas with draggable blocks, a style manager, a layer tree and an asset manager. It ships preset configurations — one for web pages, one for newsletters — and the newsletter preset produces the old-fashioned table-based HTML that email clients actually render correctly.
What it is good for. Edition 2 recommended Listmonk and said plainly that its editor is "functional, not friendly. No drag-and-drop email designer." That gap is still open, and it is one of the quieter reasons a mailing list keeps getting postponed — writing HTML email by hand is miserable work, and Claude Code can produce it but nobody can eyeball whether it will survive Outlook. The newsletter preset here is the missing piece. The second use is marketing pages: a single-page React app cannot rank, which is why Edition 3 covered Astro, and GrapesJS exports plain HTML and CSS that drops straight into an Astro page — so a landing-page variant, or a translated version of one, is a duplicate-and-edit rather than a rebuild. And of everything on this page, its licence is the friendliest: BSD-3-Clause means the editor can legitimately be embedded inside a commercial product, for end users who want to build their own report layouts.
- BSD-3-Clause — the most permissive licence in today's edition, and safe to embed commercially
- The newsletter preset outputs email-safe table HTML, which is precisely the thing Listmonk asks you to write by hand
- Exports plain HTML and CSS with no runtime dependency, so nothing built in it is locked inside it
- It is a framework, not an application. You assemble a builder from presets and plugins before you can use it as one — an evening with Claude Code, not a five-minute download
- The GitHub releases page looks stale (its latest tag shows no readable year), and only npm reveals that it is shipping steadily. Check npm for this project, not GitHub — the same trap as turftopic in Edition 4
- The HTML it generates is verbose and wrapper-heavy. Fine for email, worth cleaning before it goes into a page you want fast
Export the HTML and paste it into Listmonk's template, or into an Astro page beside the Starlight docs.
npm install grapesjs grapesjs-preset-newsletter
