Comparison: 9 plugins to add inline styles to text blocks

Kadence Blocks

Kadence blocks only adds an option to “highlight” with no option to select the color.

Ghost Kit

Ghost Kit introduces the concept of “highlight” and “Badge”. The first one will not let you slect the color, and he second one can only be used to add a background.

I like them, but they seem a little bit limited.

Ghost Kit expands the styling options of all plugins, by adding new block-level sidebar settings. You can read the full review on Ghost Kit on this two part article (Part 1: Block list & Part 2: Extra features).

Stackable

Stackable uses a fairly basic but easy to use system.

Qubely

The plugin offers three options: color, background and text-transform.

This may be just me, but I find that once you set a color for a string, there is no way to edit or remove it.

CoBlocks

CoBlocks comes with a few very advanced typography settings, including these:

• Font Family
• Weight
• Transform
• Size
• Line Height
• Letter Space

These settings are great but they are all “block-level”, which will prevent you from adding any inline styles (i.e. change the color of a word within a paragraph block). In fact I believe this panel should be on the right sidebar, since this is a block option, not an inline one.

In fact the online inline option it offers is text-transform, which is not particularly useful anyway.

Kioken Blocks

Similarly to CoBlocks, Kioken offers several font styling option for the text in a given block, but this cannot be applied inline, only to the block as a whole.

The latest version of the plugin offers inline highlighing.

It also includes two basic but interesting new settings: “Half opacity” and “Spaced letters“.

Kioken also includes new side panels to style all blocks, not just its own. You can read more about them on the review I posted here.

Mighty Blocks

I find this to be particularly easy and intiutive to use: The buttons are added on the top level of the block settings (instead of being hidden under the “extra” options under the “arrow”), there is a button for each option (color and background) and it even includes an button to clear all styles

The plugin also allows you to add gradient backgrounds to any block.

One of my favourite things about Mighty Blocks is that it does not include any new blocks, it is aimed only at extending existing blocks. This also includes new side panels with extra block styling options. I made a full review of this plugin on a separate post here.

Advanced Rich Text Tools

This plugin by Ella Van Durpe works slightly different from other plugins in that it allows to add inline colors from the sidedebar settings, instead of doing so from the tool box right on top of the plugin.

I really like this choice as I think that reusing existing UI patterns makes new features easier to discover and use:

These two settings also work with heading blocks:

The plugin also enables superscript and subscript.

I particularly like the fact that the plugin will add valid HTML:

<p>H<sub>2</sub>O</p>

EditorsKit

Last but not least I wanted to mention this plugin, which adds inline editing tools oriented to advanced content creators. Most of these features not just users wanting to make their site look “pretty”, but very handy options and tweaks.

• Highlighted Text or Heading Colors
• Highlighted Text Background Color
• Paragraph Justify Alignment
• Underline Text Format
• Superscript
• Subscript
• Uppercase Text Transform
• Nonbreaking Space

Wrapping it up

I will say that my favourite plugins here are Mighty Blocks & Advanced Rich Text Tools (for their simplicity) and Editor Kit (for its completeness), followed by Kioken Blocks.

I particularly like the fact that some of these plugins are focused solely on adding inline styles, and do not add a any new blocks.