When comparing Orion vs GitHub Codespaces, the Slant community recommends GitHub Codespaces for most people. In the question“What are the best cloud IDEs?” GitHub Codespaces is ranked 18th while Orion is ranked 30th. The most important reason people chose GitHub Codespaces is:
Your Visual Studio local preferences and extensions are saved within GitHub, allowing you to use your configurations on the go.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Plug-ins including Pixlr image editor
Pro Built for front-end development
Orion was developed specifically for front-end development, making it a strong option for front-end developers thanks to features like syntax validation with ESLint and HTML content assist.
Pro Eclipse-like UI
Orion is developed by Eclipse and shares a lot in common with the Eclipse IDE UI.
Pro Preferences are synced
Your Visual Studio local preferences and extensions are saved within GitHub, allowing you to use your configurations on the go.
Pro One-click experience
Designed to make contributing to a repository easier, all it takes to start the cloud IDE is its dedicated button within the repository page.
Pro Visual Studio Codespaces extensions works as-is
If you are a customer for Visual Studio Codespaces, your extension to control GitHub Codespaces will also work and you will be able to use your Visual Studio Code to interact to the Codespace instead of using the Web IDE if need be.
Pro Extensible and configurable
Borrowing from its bigger sister, Visual Studio Codespaces, which is also based on Visual Studio Code, any VS Code extensions work outside the box, no gotchas.
Pro Customizable environments
Environments can be customized in the user-level or the repository using a container declaration file, allowing the environments to be tailored according to the user and the target project
Cons
Con No runtime environment
Does mostly do file editing, but without good project support, web terminal, build/runtime environment.
Con JavaScript only
Orion currently only supports JavaScript.
Con Limited to GitHub
As this is a GitHub Product, do not expect it to work with the likes of GitLab or BitBucket. If you want to use third party VCS providers, you might want to use Visual Studio Codespaces instead.
Con Limited to 5 Codespaces instances
GitHub Codespaces currently limits you to 5 concurrent working codespaces. You have to delete another to start another codespace.
Con Early-Access Software
Currently invite-only, expect GitHub Codespaces to have some bugs until its GA release.