StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Text Editor
  5. CodePen vs CodeSandbox

CodePen vs CodeSandbox

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

CodePen
CodePen
Stacks160
Followers233
Votes0
CodeSandbox
CodeSandbox
Stacks101
Followers289
Votes25

CodePen vs CodeSandbox: What are the differences?

  1. Key Difference 1: Live Preview Option - CodePen offers a live preview option where users can see their code output in real-time without having to open a separate tab or window. CodeSandbox, on the other hand, does not have a native live preview option, and users need to manually refresh the browser to see the updated output.

  2. Key Difference 2: Collaboration and Sharing - CodePen allows users to collaborate with others in real-time by sharing a link to their pens, allowing multiple users to work on the same project simultaneously. CodeSandbox also supports collaboration, but it requires users to sign up and create an account before they can share their projects.

  3. Key Difference 3: Supported Languages and Frameworks - CodePen supports a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Vue, and more. CodeSandbox, on the other hand, mainly focuses on web development and provides support for popular frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue.

  4. Key Difference 4: Project Organization - CodePen allows users to organize their projects into collections and can create private pens for personal use. CodeSandbox, on the other hand, provides a more structured project organization with the ability to create multiple files within a project and manage dependencies.

  5. Key Difference 5: Integrated Development Environment (IDE) - CodePen provides a simple and lightweight IDE with a code editor, preview window, and console for debugging. CodeSandbox, on the other hand, offers a more robust IDE with features like code linting, auto-completion, and integrated terminal, making it more suitable for larger projects and complex development workflows.

  6. Key Difference 6: Pricing and Plans - CodePen offers both free and paid subscription plans, with the paid plans offering additional features like asset hosting and collaboration history. CodeSandbox also offers free and paid plans, but the paid plans mainly focus on additional features like team collaboration and advanced exporting options.

In summary, CodePen has a live preview option, supports a wide range of languages and frameworks, offers project organization into collections, provides a simple IDE, and has different pricing plans. CodeSandbox, on the other hand, mainly focuses on web development, offers a more structured project organization, provides a robust IDE, and has different pricing plans mainly focused on additional collaboration features.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

CodePen
CodePen
CodeSandbox
CodeSandbox

It is a social development environment for front-end designers and developers.. It functions as an online code editor and open-source learning environment, where developers can create code snippets, creatively named "pens", and test them.

CodeSandbox allows developers to simply go to a URL in their browser to start building. This not only makes it easier to get started, it also makes it easier to share. You can just share your created work by sharing the URL, others can then (without downloading) further develop on these sandboxes.

Statistics
Stacks
160
Stacks
101
Followers
233
Followers
289
Votes
0
Votes
25
Pros & Cons
Cons
  • 4
    No support for any other git-server than github
Pros
  • 9
    Awesome way to fun kickstart your ReactJS apps
  • 7
    Online vs-code editor look and feel to start react
  • 5
    Is open-source
  • 4
    Easiest way to showcase
Cons
  • 4
    250 module limit
  • 1
    Hard to use the console
Integrations
No integrations available
React
React
JavaScript
JavaScript

What are some alternatives to CodePen, CodeSandbox?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Red Hat Codeready Workspaces

Red Hat Codeready Workspaces

Built on the open Eclipse Che project, Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces provides developer workspaces, which include all the tools and the dependencies that are needed to code, build, test, run, and debug applications.

AWS Cloud9

AWS Cloud9

Cloud9 provides a development environment in the cloud. Cloud9 enables developers to get started with coding immediately with pre-setup environments called workspaces, collaborate with their peers with collaborative coding features, and build web apps with features like live preview and browser compatibility testing. It supports more than 40 languages, with class A support for PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript/Node.js, and Go.

Notepad++

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Emacs

Emacs

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Brackets

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

Koding

Koding

Koding is a feature rich cloud-based development environment complete with free VMs, an attractive IDE & sudo level terminal access!

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana