Glitch competitor: CodePen's new Projects thing

Glitch Help
1

Looks like CodePen is making progress on being a Glitch competitor:
https://blog.codepen.io/2017/03/20/codepen-projects-is-here/
(All I know so far is what that post says. And I did check with the Glitch folks – as I expected, they’re very happy for us to talk about Glitch competitors here! Thanks, y’all!)

So I’m curious if anyone has tried CodePen’s new Projects feature and what are the ways it still falls short of Glitch (presumably in running server-side javascript, for starters) and what it might do better, etc. Looks like they’re further along on letting you point your own domain to a CodePen-hosted project, for example.

PS: I just searched for other posts about competitors and see I myself started one almost a year ago!

(I’ll wikify that now and add CodePen and remove Nitrous (RIP)!)

2

CodePen’s Projects are currently not free and the number of projects are capped. You also have to pay for collaborative editing.

3

CodePen Projects really seem interesting, and CodePen is a very well known editor that works pretty well.

I feel like the main difference, from a technical prospective, is that they don’t provide you a backend. No backend means:

  • no persistence: you don’t have a place in which to store your files
  • no server-side logic: say you want your own build pipeline, or run some tests, or just customize the way in which you manage users or other resources in your webapp. You can’t. The best you can do is learn out to use FireBase (good luck with it :slight_smile: ) or some other “serverless” services, and pay even more.

From a community point of view, we want to focus a lot more on creating a community of people that are interested in sharing and helping each other. We focus a lot on the collaboration features, and more features (be ready!) are coming in the forthcoming months.

Glitch aims at being a real server and focuses a lot on community. CodePen focuses on being a very good front-end development environment.

This is of course a Glitch dev talking, and I don’t want to say CodePen isn’t great (it is great) but… well, Glitch is already more powerful, doesn’t lock you in, it is more collaborative… and of course we love it more :stuck_out_tongue:

4 Likes