Long story short: What are folks using for alternatives?
For context: I’m a teacher, and I’ve been using Glitch in an Intro to Web Dev college course. I love how welcoming it is to newbies, how you can just start coding and then *boom* you have a URL you can share, not just with your teacher, but with your friends, family, Insta followers, whatever. It’s truly amazing.
So when I learned that Glitch was shutting down, I was pretty heartbroken. I’m trying to find an alternative that provides that welcoming environment, and the right amount of abstraction: you can immediately get started coding, but you can still get to the underlying file structure if you want to see how it fits together.
I’ve previously used Replit, but they now limit the number of free projects, and they’ve rebranded to be more about vibe coding which isn’t what I’m going for. I’ve also used CodePen and JSFiddle, but they’re a little too simplified for my purposes. I’m also looking into VS Code and CodeSandbox, but those are both a little more advanced than I’m looking for.
Worst case scenario, I’ll revert back to students creating files on their local computers, but I know this means I’ll be spending an inordinate amount of time with students stuggling with the underlying filesystem instead of the interesting stuff.
So, with all of that in mind, where are folks (especially teachers and students) migrating to now that Glitch is sunsetting?
i personally have moved to Netlify and i believe for what i need: it works well for me. it allows the creation of static sites. the huge downside is you have to create the folder and such on your computer then drag and drop the folder of all the files into netlify instead of it having a live editor like glitch. i have seen other people recommending Neocity, and i believe that might work for you. sorry for the long response, lol.
For education purposes I’ve started defaulting to GitHub Codespaces. It’s VS Code in the browser so it is overwhelming for people new to coding, but you can add a configuration to your repo specifying settings to e.g. hide some of the UI elements. I made a sample config in this repo that creates an experience a little bit more like Glitch:
It doesn’t act as a host although you can share preview URLs with collaborators. For static sites you can deploy to GitHub Pages in there, and for other platforms that e.g. deploy when you push to a branch in a repo, you can do that through the Codespace editor when you commit changes, or using the editor Terminal for CLI tools.
One issue for students is that although you can use Codespaces for free, I believe after a certain period they do ask for a credit card (even though you can set it to zero for spending) – I’m not sure what the provision is for Codespace usage with GitHub student accounts.
I have used codespaces quite extensively (to the point of running out of monthly hours) and have never been asked to add billing information; i’m not on the student plan. Things might be different for newer accounts perhaps.
Interesting! Mine is a pretty old account so I doubt it’s related to account age. I span up a lot of new codespaces at one point so am guessing it’s perhaps been related to a specific usage pattern, others have reported being asked for a credit card after one month of codespace usage as well. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be clearly documented so it’s awkward to advise people what will happen.
The main reason I have used Glitch over the years is for running Node backends on very low-traffic sites. The killer features for me were free, and very quick and easy to set one up, just by copying a bit of code into a browser. No mucking around with security groups or CLI SDKs I have to install locally.
Is there anything else like that? I’m really not sure what I will use for these projects now.
EDIT Ok, it looks like Val.Town fits this need very well. The UI feels like a more modern, slicker version of Glitch. The main issue is there are some different patterns required: you can’t use Express, you have to return a custom HTTP handler function, but for my needs, this will be manageable.
look into render.com as well - it gives you a running container (and you can pay for “always on”). it’s probably the closest to the glitch-as-a-host experience.
I was thinking of moving to CodePen, since all I want is for my CS-0 students to be able to create static web sites. Do you want something more powerful than that in your course?