Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

CodePen VS Observable

Compare CodePen VS Observable and see what are their differences

CodePen logo CodePen

A front end web development playground.

Observable logo Observable

Interactive code examples/posts
  • CodePen Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30
  • Observable Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-09

CodePen videos

What Is Codepen?

More videos:

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

Observable videos

Observable Overview

More videos:

  • Review - observablehq.com review observable hq data analysis
  • Review - Hands-on Data Visualization with Observable Plot

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to CodePen and Observable)
Text Editors
100 100%
0% 0
Data Visualization
0 0%
100% 100
Programming
100 100%
0% 0
Data Dashboard
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

CodePen Reviews

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.
6 Coding Playgrounds For Web Developers
Codepen is probably one of the most popular coding playgrounds out there. Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks is a co-founder/co-creator of Codepen, which probably explains why this web app looks grand. Aside from its sleek visuals, Codepen displays live previews of the changes you make in its editor, making it easier to see cause and effect.

Observable Reviews

Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Observable is a Grafana alternative that enables users to visualize data via charts and dashboards using code.
Source: middleware.io
Embedded analytics in B2B SaaS: A comparison
A few options were disregarded from the start due to a hefty price tag, these were Looker, Tableau, Power BI, GoodData. A few options like Trevor.io, Preset, Observable were disregarded as they did not seem to fit our criteria (based on the evaluation matrix).
Source: medium.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, CodePen should be more popular than Observable. It has been mentiond 485 times since March 2021. 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.

CodePen mentions (485)

  • Building the Blocks of the Web: A Beginner's Guide to HTML
    The key to mastering HTML is consistent practice. Experiment with different tags, attributes, and layouts to solidify your understanding and gain creative confidence. There are many online playgrounds like CodePen [https://codepen.io/] where you can experiment with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. - Source: dev.to / about 10 hours ago
  • Things you should do in your dev journey 🖥️👩‍💻
    Build Projects: Websites like GitHub and GitLab host countless open-source projects where you can contribute and collaborate with other developers. Moreover, platforms like CodePen and Glitch provide environments for building and sharing web projects. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • 10 Websites Every Web Developer Should Bookmark
    (https://codepen.io/) This online code editor and community is a playground for developers. Experiment with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code snippets, create visual demos, and share your creations with the world. CodePen is a great way to showcase your coding skills and learn from others. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • 5 ways to style text with CSS inspired by the Spider-verse
    See the Pen Styling text with a CSS glitch animation - Version 2 by Oscar Jite-Orimiono (@oscar-jite) on CodePen. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Codepen, Codesandbox and JSFiddle support in SciChart.js
    Today we've just published a quick minor update, v3.0.284. One of the things that's the most interesting is we've added Codepen, JSFiddle and Codesandbox support to SciChart.js. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
View more

Observable mentions (286)

  • I'm writing a new vector search SQLite Extension
    Could this be implemented in Rust? Does that project (sqlite-loadable-rs) support WASM? https://observablehq.com/@asg017/introducing-sqlite-loadable-rs. - Source: Hacker News / 18 days ago
  • Show HN: An extension to track your Wikipedia adventures
    Have you tried out a tangled-tree visualization? [1] I've found it to be super useful when visualizing these sorts of relationships in a compact way. [1] https://observablehq.com/@nitaku/tangled-tree-visualization-ii. - Source: Hacker News / 19 days ago
  • A feature-rich front-end drag-and-drop component library
    Maybe I'm easy to impress, but I always stop and play around with the nested tree example when I come across Sortable. It works so flawlessly, and feels very tuned to mobile dnd. It even works to arrange (and reflow) inline spans in a paragraph! I have yet to come across this functionality in a text editor.. [0]: https://observablehq.com/@dleeftink/sortable-playground. - Source: Hacker News / 26 days ago
  • Parquet-WASM: Rust-based WebAssembly bindings to read and write Parquet data
    Arrow JS is just ArrayBuffers underneath. You do want to amortize some operations to avoid unnecessary conversions. I.e. Arrow JS stores strings as UTF-8, but native JS strings are UTF-16 I believe. Arrow is especially powerful across the WASM <--> JS boundary! In fact, I wrote a library to interpret Arrow from Wasm memory into JS without any copies [0]. (Motivating blog post [1]) [0]:... - Source: Hacker News / 29 days ago
  • A flat map with the least error possible: The Gott-Goldberg-Vanderbei projection
    Here’s the D3 implementation (which is just an interrupted azimuthal equidistant projection): https://observablehq.com/@d3/azimuthal-equidistant-hemispheres. - Source: Hacker News / 29 days ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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

RunKit - RunKit notebooks are interactive javascript playgrounds connected to a complete node environment right in your browser. Every npm module pre-installed.

CodeSandbox - Online playground for React

D3.js - D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS.

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.

Jupyter - Project Jupyter exists to develop open-source software, open-standards, and services for interactive computing across dozens of programming languages. Ready to get started? Try it in your browser Install the Notebook.