CodePen vs StackBlitz

Overview

CodePen

Stacks160

Followers233

Votes0

StackBlitz

Stacks78

Followers259

Votes20

GitHub Stars10.7K

Forks1.2K

CodePen vs StackBlitz: What are the differences?

Introduction

CodePen and StackBlitz are both popular online code editors and playgrounds that allow developers to write, test, and share their code in a browser-based environment. While they share some similarities, there are key differences between the two platforms.

Platform Purpose: CodePen is primarily designed as a social development environment, providing a platform for developers to show off their work, collaborate with others, and find inspiration. On the other hand, StackBlitz is more focused on creating powerful development environments for building full-stack web applications and exploring different frameworks and libraries.
Environment Configuration: In CodePen, developers can quickly start coding by selecting a template or framework from a list provided by the platform. CodePen also offers a simplified UI and limited options for build tools and configurations. In contrast, StackBlitz provides a more powerful development environment with support for popular frameworks and libraries out of the box, allowing for more complex project configurations and setup.
Real-time Collaboration: CodePen offers real-time collaboration features, allowing multiple users to work on a project together simultaneously. This makes it a great tool for pair programming or remote collaboration. StackBlitz, on the other hand, currently does not support real-time collaboration, and each user has their own separate instance of the code editor.
Deployment Options: CodePen provides a simple way to showcase your work by allowing you to publish your projects as live web pages with a custom URL. This feature is especially useful for sharing demos or examples. StackBlitz, on the other hand, is more focused on the development process and does not have built-in options for deploying your projects as standalone websites.
Integrated Development Environment (IDE): StackBlitz offers a fully-featured IDE with powerful code editing capabilities, including syntax highlighting, code completion, and debugging tools. CodePen, while having a code editor, is more limited in terms of IDE features and is designed to be a lightweight and straightforward environment for writing and testing code.
Community and Documentation: CodePen has a vibrant and active community of developers, making it easy to connect with others, get feedback on your projects, and find code examples to learn from. CodePen also provides extensive documentation and resources to help developers get started. StackBlitz, while also having a community, may not have the same level of activity and resources as CodePen, but it still provides documentation and support for developers using the platform.

In summary, CodePen is more focused on social development and collaboration, with a simplified UI and deployment options for showcasing projects, while StackBlitz offers a more powerful development environment with integrated IDE features and support for exploring different frameworks and libraries.

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Detailed Comparison

CodePen	StackBlitz
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.	StackBlitz is the browser-based IDE that eliminates time-consuming local configuration and lets you spend  more time coding. Develop with Next.js, React, Angular, Vite, and more in a Node.js development environment entirely in your browser
-	GitHub integration; Figma integration; Storybook integration; VS Code extension support; Full terminal; npm, pnpm, and yarn support
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 10.7K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 1.2K
Stacks 160	Stacks 78
Followers 233	Followers 259
Votes 0	Votes 20
Pros & Cons
Cons 4 No support for any other git-server than github	Pros 9 It just works 5 Fast loading 4 Can sign-in with third-party account. E.g. Github 2 Full terminal Cons 1 Not able to upload Images 1 Cannot upload Images 1 Only support projects scaffolded with @angular/cli
Integrations
No integrations available	Bitbucket GitLab GitHub Enterprise Figma Github Native Storybook

What are some alternatives to CodePen, StackBlitz?

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

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 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

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

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

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++ 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

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

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

Koding

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

Related Comparisons

CodePen vs StackBlitz: What are the differences?

Introduction

Platform Purpose: CodePen is primarily designed as a social development environment, providing a platform for developers to show off their work, collaborate with others, and find inspiration. On the other hand, StackBlitz is more focused on creating powerful development environments for building full-stack web applications and exploring different frameworks and libraries.
Environment Configuration: In CodePen, developers can quickly start coding by selecting a template or framework from a list provided by the platform. CodePen also offers a simplified UI and limited options for build tools and configurations. In contrast, StackBlitz provides a more powerful development environment with support for popular frameworks and libraries out of the box, allowing for more complex project configurations and setup.
Real-time Collaboration: CodePen offers real-time collaboration features, allowing multiple users to work on a project together simultaneously. This makes it a great tool for pair programming or remote collaboration. StackBlitz, on the other hand, currently does not support real-time collaboration, and each user has their own separate instance of the code editor.
Deployment Options: CodePen provides a simple way to showcase your work by allowing you to publish your projects as live web pages with a custom URL. This feature is especially useful for sharing demos or examples. StackBlitz, on the other hand, is more focused on the development process and does not have built-in options for deploying your projects as standalone websites.
Integrated Development Environment (IDE): StackBlitz offers a fully-featured IDE with powerful code editing capabilities, including syntax highlighting, code completion, and debugging tools. CodePen, while having a code editor, is more limited in terms of IDE features and is designed to be a lightweight and straightforward environment for writing and testing code.
Community and Documentation: CodePen has a vibrant and active community of developers, making it easy to connect with others, get feedback on your projects, and find code examples to learn from. CodePen also provides extensive documentation and resources to help developers get started. StackBlitz, while also having a community, may not have the same level of activity and resources as CodePen, but it still provides documentation and support for developers using the platform.

CodePen vs StackBlitz

Overview