In reply to Carolann.

Do not worry about being confused. The terminology around the block editor and Gutenberg often gets muddied. It may even be worth doing a post that dives deeper into this subject. But, here's the short version:

The editor you have running on your website since WordPress 5.0 is called the block editor.

Gutenberg is the name of the project and plugin where development of the block editor (and beyond) happens before it lands in WordPress. It's basically a codename for the block editor project. When we talk about future features, these are things that are generally already in progress within the Gutenberg plugin but not WordPress itself.

You absolutely do not need to install the Gutenberg plugin unless you want to test the latest features before they are in WordPress. I highly recommend using it because you will always have access to the latest and greatest features, sometimes months in advance. With that said, there are sometimes theme incompatibilities when running the plugin. The plugin is stable and not quite bleeding-edge, but you should keep in mind that sometimes things may break. We run the plugin here on WP Tavern because I like to use the newest stuff.