Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

CodePen VS thinkific

Compare CodePen VS thinkific and see what are their differences

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CodePen logo CodePen

A front end web development playground.

thinkific logo thinkific

Create online courses and membership sites with Thinkific and feel confident that you’ve got the easiest technology and the best support in the industry.
  • CodePen Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30
  • thinkific Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-12-14

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.

thinkific features and specs

  • User-Friendly Interface
    Thinkific offers an intuitive and easy-to-navigate interface which makes it simple for users to create and manage online courses without needing extensive technical knowledge.
  • Customizable Course Sites
    It provides a range of customization options for course creators, allowing them to personalize their websites to match their brand and aesthetics.
  • No Transaction Fees
    Thinkific does not charge transaction fees on course sales, which means creators keep more of their revenue compared to some other platforms.
  • Comprehensive Support
    Users have access to detailed documentation, customer support, and a community forum, which can be quite helpful in troubleshooting and optimizing their course offerings.
  • Integrated Marketing Tools
    Thinkific includes a range of marketing features such as email marketing, affiliate marketing, and coupons to help users promote their courses effectively.
  • Built-in Analytics
    The platform offers robust analytics and reporting tools that enable course creators to track student progress, engagement, and overall performance.

Possible disadvantages of thinkific

  • Pricing
    Thinkific's pricing can be relatively high for smaller creators or those just starting out, especially if they want to access more advanced features available only on higher-tier plans.
  • Limited Course Compliance Features
    While Thinkific is a strong platform overall, it lacks certain compliance features such as certifications and accreditations, which might be important for certain types of educational content.
  • Dependence on Third-Party Integrations
    Some critical features, such as email marketing automation and advanced analytics, require integrations with third-party services, leading to potential additional costs and complexity.
  • No Native Mobile App
    Thinkific does not offer native mobile apps for course creators or students, which can limit accessibility and user experience for those who prefer mobile learning.
  • Learning Curve for Advanced Features
    While the basic functionalities are user-friendly, leveraging some of the more advanced features may require a steeper learning curve, particularly for less tech-savvy users.
  • Customization Limitations
    Despite offering customization options, some users may find the templates and design capabilities somewhat restrictive compared to fully bespoke web development.

Analysis of CodePen

Overall verdict

  • Yes, CodePen is considered a good platform for web developers, both beginners and experienced. It offers a wide array of features that facilitate creative development and community engagement.

Why this product is good

  • CodePen is a popular online code editor and community platform for front-end developers to experiment with creating and sharing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript snippets. It provides an easy-to-use interface and real-time previews, making it a valuable tool for learning, prototyping, and sharing web development work. It also fosters a community where developers can showcase their projects, receive feedback, and learn from each other.

Recommended for

  • Front-end developers who want to quickly prototype and test web designs.
  • Beginners in web development looking to learn and receive feedback from the community.
  • Educators and students interested in a platform to showcase projects and collaborate.
  • Developers who want to explore creative coding and share their work with a community.

CodePen videos

What Is Codepen?

More videos:

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

thinkific videos

Thinkific Review - A Complete In-Depth Video Review

More videos:

  • Review - Thinkific vs Teachable: Which is Course Builder is Better?
  • Review - Thinkific Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to CodePen and thinkific)
Text Editors
100 100%
0% 0
Education
0 0%
100% 100
Programming
100 100%
0% 0
Online Courses
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 thinkific

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.

thinkific Reviews

9 Teachable Alternatives in 2024 Ranked
However, the right platform depends on your needs and goals. If you need a more affordable Teachable alternative, Podia or Thinkific should fit the bill quite nicely. If you are eyeing free Teachable alternatives, Thinkific’s free plan and Podia are good options. But for increased functionality and flexibility top your list of priorities, Teach is the best option to consider.
Source: teach.io
8 best Teachable alternatives for course creators (Features & pricing)
Like Teachable, Thinkific is designed for course creators. You can sell live lessons, pre-recorded videos, self-paced courses, and cohort programs. Thinkific also offers course completion certificates, assessments and assignments, and lesson prerequisites. You can even use Thinkific to build a storefront or website for your courses.
Source: www.podia.com
The Top Free and Paid Teachable Alternatives For Creators
Thinkific doesn’t have a free plan, but it offers a 14-day free trial across all plans except Plus. Paid plans start at $36/month (billed annually) and go up to $374/month depending on the tier. Check out Thinkific’s pricing page to see what you get with each plan.
14 Best Free and Paid Coursera Alternatives For Creators (2024)
Try Thinkific for yourself!Accomplish your course creation and student success goals faster with Thinkific. Please enter a valid email
Top 11 Thinkific Alternatives for Online course Creators in 2023
Lessonly is one of the best Thinkific Alternatives. Lessonly meets all the needs of their respective business better than Thinkific. When comparing the quality of ongoing product support better, you need to select Lessonly rather than Thinkific. For any feature updates and roadmaps, chose the direction of Lessonly over Thinkific. its user interface is simple and easy to...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, CodePen seems to be a lot more popular than thinkific. While we know about 503 links to CodePen, we've tracked only 5 mentions of thinkific. 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 (503)

View more

thinkific mentions (5)

  • Migrate from Thinkific to WordPress. #1 Planning and data preparation
    In this series of 5 articles, I propose to write about how I migrated from the e-learning platform Thinkific to WordPress, how I exported the data from Thinkific, what technologies I used, how WordPress Command Line Interface (WP-CLI) helped me, and how I made other minor changes to templates or using WordPress API hooks. Below, I leave you the list of articles in the series:. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Free Introduction To OSINT Course from My OSINT Training
    I recommend using VPNs for OSINT to increase your privacy, project your presence, and to increase your anonymity. Unfortunately, the platform my courses are hosted on, thinkific.com, may restrict access to their site when you use a VPN. I have no control over this but I think we both can understand why they might do this as our reasons for using VPNs are in conflict with their reasons for blocking some of them. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Job Ideas for Dentist non-clinical
    Hey I think a course is great idea, she has tons of experience that’s in demand by young clinicians. I have experience in course creations (thinkific) let me know if I can help, good luck. Source: about 2 years ago
  • How to download thinkific videos.
    If you want to watch the thinkific.com videos offline on your Mac or Windows computer or portable devices like iPad, iPhone, iPod, Xbox, Apple TV, PSP, Samsung TV, Samsung phone, Blackberry phone, etc., you will need to download and convert videos from thinkific.com. In this article, we will introduce a professional yet easy to use thinkific.com Downloader and a step by step guide on how to download thinkific.com... Source: over 2 years ago
  • How to download thinkific.com videos.
    Ever wish to download videos form thinkific.com, but failed? If so, you come to the right place. The aim of this article is to recommend a free and green thinkific.com downloader, without virus, malware, plug-ins, adware, etc. With this thinkific.com Download, users are not only able to save countless thinkific.com videos to your pc or devices like phone, pad, TV, etc. Source: over 2 years ago

What are some alternatives?

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

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

Udemy - Online Courses - Learn Anything, On Your Schedule

CodeSandbox - Online playground for React

Adobe Learning Manager - Adobe Learning Manager (formerly Adobe Captivate Prime LMS) is easy to setup and helps in delivering engaging learning experiences in a personalized manner across devices.

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.

Moodle - Moodle is the world's most popular learning management system. Start creating your online learning site in minutes!