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CKEditor VS CodePen

Compare CKEditor VS CodePen and see what are their differences

CKEditor logo CKEditor

Real-time collaborative future-ready rich text editor

CodePen logo CodePen

A front end web development playground.
  • CKEditor Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-07-08

CKEditor 5 is a modern WYSIWYG rich text editor that can easily accommodate the requirements of businesses and users in the age of digital transformation. It allows software creators and developers to build powerful writing solutions for applications of all sorts, within hours. Thanks to a fully customizable framework, ready-to-use builds, native integrations, extensive documentation, and reliable customer support, the editor can be fully tailored to your needs.

To provide users with all-around streamlined and collaborative writing experience, you can additionally include advanced features such as Track Changes and Comments, Revision History, and (if preferred) Real-time Collaboration! Easy Export to PDF and Word, responsive images, pagination, Markdown input and output support, and robust paste from Word and Google Docs are also popular choices.

  • CodePen Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30

CKEditor features and specs

  • Real-time collaboration editing
    Premium
  • Comments
    Premium
  • Track changes
    Premium
  • Revision History
    Premium
  • CKBox File Manager
    Premium
  • Autoformatting
  • Autolink
  • Autosave
  • Basic text styles (Bold, Italic, Highlight, Underline, Strikethrough, Subscript, Superscript)
  • Code & Quote Blocks
  • Drag and drop
  • Export to PDF and Word
    Premium
  • Find and replace
  • Font styles
  • Image resize, style & alignment
  • Image responsiveness
  • Inserting images by pasting URL
  • Keyboard shortcuts
  • Lists (bulleted, numbered, checklists)
  • Markdown support
  • Math and Chemical formulas
    Premium
  • Media embed
  • @Mentions
  • Pagination
    Premium
  • Paste from Word & G-Docs
  • Read-only support
  • Restricted editing
  • Spell and grammar checking
    Premium
  • Tables support with columns resizing, selecting rows and columns
  • Text layout
  • Word count
  • React integration
  • Vue JS integration
  • Angular integration

CodePen features and specs

  • Real-time Collaboration
    Developers can collaborate with others in real-time, making it easy to work on projects with teammates or seek help from the community.
  • Immediate Visual Feedback
    CodePen allows you to see the results of your code as you write it, which is highly beneficial for learning and debugging.
  • Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
    CodePen provides a comfortable and feature-rich online IDE environment with syntax highlighting, autocomplete, and more.
  • Community-Driven
    Users can share their work with the CodePen community, receive feedback, and explore a wide range of projects created by others.
  • Extensive Resources
    CodePen offers a wealth of examples and templates for various web development tasks, making it a useful resource for learning and inspiration.
  • Cross-Device Accessibility
    Being an online platform, CodePen can be accessed from any device with an internet connection, making it convenient for developers on the move.

Possible disadvantages of CodePen

  • Limited Offline Functionality
    Since CodePen is primarily an online tool, it requires an internet connection for most of its features to work, limiting its usefulness in offline environments.
  • Performance Constraints
    Complex or resource-intensive projects may not perform as well on CodePen as they would in a full-fledged local development environment.
  • Subscription Costs
    While many features are free, advanced functionalities and additional storage options require a paid subscription, which may not be ideal for all users.
  • Limited Backend Capabilities
    CodePen is primarily designed for front-end development, so it offers limited support for backend technologies, making it less suitable for full-stack or server-side development.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing dependencies and libraries can be cumbersome compared to local development environments which have better tools for this purpose, like npm.
  • Security Concerns
    Sharing projects with the public can expose your code and assets to unauthorized use, posing potential intellectual property and security risks.

CKEditor videos

CKEditor 5 - Collaboration features

More videos:

  • Demo - CKEditor 5 – Revision History feature

CodePen videos

What Is Codepen?

More videos:

  • Review - Learn to use CodePen from a co-founder of CodePen
  • Review - Using CodePen For Inspiration & Learning

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to CKEditor and CodePen)
Text Editors
23 23%
77% 77
Rich Text Editor
100 100%
0% 0
Programming
0 0%
100% 100
IDEs And Text Editors
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using CKEditor and CodePen. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare CKEditor and CodePen

CKEditor Reviews

14 Best Open Source WYSIWYG HTML Editors
CKEditor 5 is a feature-rich and open-source WYSIWYG editing solution with great flexibility. The user interface looks modern. Hence, you may expect a modern user experience.
Source: itsfoss.com
Looking for a CKEditor? Try these 10 Alternatives
CKEditor is a popular, versatile WYSIWYG text editor which allows you to write content directly on web pages or online applications. It can be used to create Word-like documents or provide a simple toolbar for email and instant message content. CKEditor provides rich text formatting options as well as spell check.

CodePen Reviews

Best Forums for Developers to Join in 2025
Codepen is a social network for developers to show off their work, ask and answer questions, and exchange ideas. It's like a Reddit for coding and design, with a large community of talented web developers.
Source: www.notchup.com
Top 10 Developer Communities You Should Explore
Codepen is a social development environment that allows developers to showcase their work and experiment with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a collaborative space. Codepen’s focus on visual and interactive development makes it an excellent community for front-end developers and designers.
Source: www.qodo.ai
8 Best Replit Alternatives & Competitors in 2022 (Free & Paid) - Software Discover
Codepen is a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. Build and deploy a website, show off your work, build test cases to learn.
Best Online Code Editors For Web Developers
Probably the most popular online code editor. CodePen is fast, easy to use, and allows a web developer to write and share HTML/CSS/JS code online.
Source: techarge.in
Top 25 websites for coding challenge and competition [Updated for 2021]
CodePen is a cool online IDE that allows you to write code in your browser and see the result just as you build it. CodePen challenges is a place for leveling up your skills by building things. Each week, new challenges appear for you to tackle, and the best “Pens” get picked.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, CodePen seems to be a lot more popular than CKEditor. While we know about 502 links to CodePen, we've tracked only 10 mentions of CKEditor. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

CKEditor mentions (10)

  • Storybook Starter Guide: Learn Design System Principles
    For example, at CKEditor, we use a hybrid approach — Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets (Sass) preprocessor and CSS variables:. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Your rich text could be a cross-site scripting vulnerability
    Another sign that your application might vulnerable to SXSS is simply whether or not you are using a rich text editor, such as TinyMCE or CKEditor. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Rails Frontend Bundling - Which one should I choose?
    Problematic dependencies. Some dependencies like CKEditor are designed specifically to work with Webpacker and won't work with other tools. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Best Text Editor to integrate with React?
    At my work, we recently released a beta of our switch CKEditor, coming from Draftjs. Works pretty well. They have a free license available, not sure if that would cover your use-case tho. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Managers want to build a Web Rich Text Editor from scratch - Seems like bad idea
    Every place where the mismanager wanted a rich text editor ended up skinning/modding what is now called CKEditor . It used to be called "FCKEditor" because of the initials of the guy who wrote it, but almost everyone reading it put the letter U in where it didn't belong. Sorry Frederico Caldeira Knabben. Source: about 2 years ago
View more

CodePen mentions (502)

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What are some alternatives?

When comparing CKEditor and CodePen, you can also consider the following products

TinyMCE - TinyMCE is a content editor that functions as a plug-in for Wordpress websites.

JSFiddle - Test your JavaScript, CSS, HTML or CoffeeScript online with JSFiddle code editor.

Summernote - Summernote is a JavaScript library that helps users create WYSIWYG editors online.

CodeSandbox - Online playground for React

Quill - Powerful, API-driven rich text editor

GitHub - Originally founded as a project to simplify sharing code, GitHub has grown into an application used by over a million people to store over two million code repositories, making GitHub the largest code host in the world.