When comparing Collide vs Codepen, the Slant community recommends Codepen for most people. In the question“What are the best cloud IDEs?” Codepen is ranked 17th while Collide is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose Codepen is:
CodePen makes it really easy to export code as a zip or Github Gist.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Open source
Collide is open source and completely free to use.
Pro Easily export your pen
CodePen makes it really easy to export code as a zip or Github Gist.
Pro Real time output
Pro Lots of support for frameworks and preprocessors
CodePen has an impressive amount of support for preprocessors (such as Jade, Haml, Slim, Sass, Less, Stylus, Coffeescript and PostCSS). There is also plenty of frameworks and libraries to pick from (Foundation, Bootstrap, Angular, D3, Backbone, Ember etc.).
Pro Great display/profile page
The codepen profile page allows you to display all of your public pens, and control which order you want them to be viewed in. This is great for showing off your work to possible employers, other devs etc..
Pro Easily fork pens
To fork a pen only requires clicking one button, and you'll be able to modify the pen on your own account.
Pro Great community pens
You can search through other pens, either by keyword or popular, picked or recent.
Cons
Con Not actively developed
Collide was originally developed by Google, who abandoned the project before it was originally released in 2012.
They open sourced the code, hoping it would continue with the community. The most up-to-date branch has not been updated in 2 years.
Con No private pens with free account
There is an option on Codepen for private pens, however it requires upgrading to a Pro account ($9/month).