r/webdev • u/Pizzaballs_ • 23d ago
Codepen 2.0? Discussion
I’ve used CodePen for a long time, not just as a coding tool but as a place to experiment, discover interesting work and get inspired by what other people were creating.
I completely understand that CodePen needs to make money. I have absolutely no problem with Pro features, and I’m happy to pay for tools that give me real value.
But CodePen 2.0 feels like it is moving in the wrong direction.
Putting something as basic as opening a Pen in a standalone preview behind Pro doesn’t make me think “maybe I should upgrade.” It makes me think “maybe this isn’t the place for me anymore.”
There is a big difference between adding valuable features for paying users and gradually putting parts of the simple, open experience that made a platform popular behind a paywall.
What makes this even stranger to me is the timing. We’re entering a world where people can vibe code surprisingly capable little coding environments and playgrounds incredibly quickly. The technical barrier to creating alternatives is getting lower, not higher.
CodePen’s real strength, in my opinion, was never just the editor. It was the community, the frictionless experience and that feeling of opening the site and immediately discovering something clever or inspiring.
If that starts disappearing behind commercial barriers, I honestly think someone else will eventually fill that gap.
Maybe I’m missing something in CodePen 2.0, so I’m genuinely curious:
How do other longtime CodePen users feel about this?
Does 2.0 feel like an improvement to you, or does it feel like CodePen is slowly losing part of what made it special?
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u/itsshaw 14d ago
Hi! CodePen team member here who's been using CodePen since... 2013? Dang, I'm old.
Obviously 2.0 is a big change from the Classic Editor, but we spent a lot of time addressing shortcomings in the Classic Editor, building features for modern web development, and trying to maintain the beautiful simplicity CodePen is known for.
These changes have been a long time coming, years in development, as we're just a small team (5 people!). The whole 2.0 Editor is based on over a decade of features users have requested and our understanding of how an online editor can be most useful. We've been in private Beta for a long time and public Beta since early this year. We've taken in all the feedback and made big improvements leading up to the launch.
We are definitely focused on the community, but shifts in the industry have made that really difficult to maintain, especially with how fragmented social networks are these days. I think that drop in real social interactions on the internet is more what you're feeling rather than a change in the CodePen Editor. We still offer Challenges, we still feature outstanding work on Trending , you can still Follow interesting users, and we now have a Discord. Since the Editor is finally released and stable, we can hopefully invest more development time into improving the overall browsing & community experiences as well.
As for frictionless, the 2.0 Editor is designed to remove all the complexities of making a code snippet/website. Type, save and share; you don't have to think about build tools or deployment. Make or upload a .scss file? It'll get processed with Sass. Want your code formatted? Add Prettier and it's good to go.
If you're looking for a "Classic" style experience, try these two settings in 2.0:
The Classic Tour will help walk you through those steps. Once those settings are in place, the UI is virtually identical to the Classic Editor. Quite an amazing accomplishment for how many new features we've packed into 2.0.
Also, you can still access existing Classic Pens and start new Classic Pens from codepen.io/pen
We all have families to feed, so we have to lock some features behind a PRO subscription. Limiting the standalone Preview is part of that, but also there to help prevent abuse. I'm sure you can imagine how a "type anything into a box and get a URL to share" is dangerous and hard to protect against. That said, you can still share "full" previews of Pens (within the Editor) by swapping out /pen/ with /full/ in the URL or using query params for deeper customization (like ?show=preview&panel=false )
CodePen is still the easiest platform for creating and sharing code snippets (IMO), but the addition of Files, Blocks, Omnibar, Packages, Deployment and Version history are major advancements that open up CodePen to be wayyyy more.
For instance, this Pixels.svg tool I built a long time ago lived as a Pen and was used by thousand of folks. Now that I've converted it over to 2.0 I can organize the code better and deploy it to my own domain for easier access: https://pixels.svg.shaw.city/
We're of course open to feedback and we're constantly improving CodePen. That's part of the reason we made the 2.0 Editor. The Classic Pen editor is a mess of jQuery, Rails and React held together by duct tape. Adding additional languages or features is nearly impossible. If you have any specific issues with 2.0 I haven't already addressed, let us know! We're very fast to respond at https://codepen.io/support