When comparing Codepen vs Codiad, the Slant community recommends Codepen for most people. In the question“What are the best cloud IDEs?” Codepen is ranked 17th while Codiad is ranked 21st. 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 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.
Pro Open source
You can run Codiad on your server to allow you and your team to edit files.
Simplest to run may be using a Docker image like linuxserver/codiad.
Pro Easy to self-host: Only requires PHP
It only requires PHP 5+ and Nginx or Apache. No database is required. This makes it really easy to install on many servers include shared hosting.
Pro Multi-line edit
Allows to edit multiple things are once by having multiple cursors like Sublime Text.
Pro Has many easily installable plugins
Many plugins exist, from Terminal, Git to Collaboration and Emmet... Plugins can be installed by using the web interface, or by manually extracting files to the right directory.
Pro Simple and easily managable GUI
Cons
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).
Con Terminal runs as same user for everyone
No matter who is the logged in user, the Terminal plugin runs commands as the PHP user. This also affects the Git plugin in that there is a single SSH key for all users using your Codiad instance.
Con Full of small bugs
There are plenty of various issues and bug that may either be due to your setup and the UI will not report them, or due to bugs in the code; I'm including common plugins here as well (just naming a few: search files and in files may report nothing if it had an error, commands stderr not printed, marketplace not showing items, search in market place showing no results, Git escaping (
by \(
in the commit message for no good reason...). Those are generally small but together it makes the product feel flawed.
Con Currently no search and replace in multiple files
There is a search in multiple files, and search & replace in current file, but not something to perform a search & replace in multiple files.
Con Terminal doesn't TTY
The terminal plugin for Codiad allows users to type some commands and see the outputs, but not interactive input is supported (i.e. stdin is closed). Meaning you cannot run Vim, Tmux or anything requiring user inputs.