Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

CodePen VS Usetiful

Compare CodePen VS Usetiful and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

CodePen logo CodePen

A front end web development playground.

Usetiful logo Usetiful

Fight user churn with great user onboarding. Interactive product tours and smart tips significantly improve your user retention.
  • CodePen Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30
  • Usetiful Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-03-20

Usetiful bridges the gap between users and digital systems. Guided tours and smart tips allow users to master any software system from day one.

Usetiful provides interactive product tours and smart tips into your application, improving user adoption and conversions instantly.

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.

Usetiful features and specs

  • Product Tours
    interactive guided tours
  • Checklists
    user onboarding checklists
  • Hotspot beacons
    pulsating elements to draw user's attention without being intrusive
  • Microsurveys
    gather user feedback seamlessly
  • Smart Tips
    contextual guidance and validation
  • Assistant widget
    customer self help
  • Easy to Set-up and use
    less than 5 min setup
  • Employee onboarding
    employee tutorials and checklist
  • Knowledge Base portal
    public self-help portal
  • Native mobile guides
    support for native mobile
  • Feature tracking
    tracking of feature adoption by user segments or individual users
  • Integrations
    connect onboarding flows to wider company operations

CodePen videos

What Is Codepen?

More videos:

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

Usetiful videos

Embedded Banners

More videos:

  • Demo - Create product tours without coding with Usetiful
  • Tutorial - User Onboarding Checklists by Usetiful
  • Demo - Usetiful - Visual Editor Demo
  • Demo - Usetiful Introduction Video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to CodePen and Usetiful)
Text Editors
100 100%
0% 0
Digital Adoption
0 0%
100% 100
Programming
100 100%
0% 0
User Onboarding And Engagement

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing CodePen and Usetiful.

What makes your product unique?

Usetiful's answer:

  • Usetiful works with native mobile - serving clients on all of their platforms
  • Usetiful is affordable - offering a free-forever plan and scalable business offerings
  • Usetiful "just works" - supporting wide range of corner cases, including exotic Single Page Applications or iFrames
  • Usetiful is secure - not only ISO27001 certified, HIPAA and GDPR compliant. But also able to run on-premise for security-intense clients

Who are some of the biggest customers of your product?

Usetiful's answer:

-Audi -DHL -DPD -Konica Minolta -Foodora -e27 -Nanyang Technological University -iChef

User comments

Share your experience with using CodePen and Usetiful. 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 CodePen and Usetiful

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.

Usetiful Reviews

  1. Marek Albrecht
    · Portal Admin at LARP Slovakia ·
    Convenient and free

    It was easy to get started - I have registered the free plan and created the first tour in approximately 15 minutes. Since then I have been improving on the experience.

    Part of my application is a single-page app. It was quite techy to get this part running. Kudos for the customer support that walked me through!

    🏁 Competitors: WalkMe
    👍 Pros:    Free basic plan|Easy to use|Great customer support
    👎 Cons:    Single page app support
  2. Martin Novak
    · Front end manager at Netwits Company ·
    A nice simple tool for user onboarding

    I use Usetiful for various clients' projects that require product tours. Everyone was satisfied so far. Web editor allows me to quickly update the content and browser extension to preview the tours. Reports provide enough detail.

    🏁 Competitors: Appcues
    👍 Pros:    Easy to use|Easy user interface|Preview function|Good price
    👎 Cons:    Nothing, so far

15 best user onboarding software you need to try in 2023
Usetiful is one of the best-value onboarding tools we’ve found — it’s premium version is just $99/month for up to 20,000 users.
8 Best Usetiful Alternatives and Competitors That Are More Professional
For non-technical people, Usetiful’s integration and setup can be extremely confusing. While it’s still possible for a person who doesn’t know how to code to integrate the tool into their website, figuring out how to do it will be difficult for sure. In order to get to the required information, the user needs to dig deep into help center articles and cherry-pick the...
Source: userguiding.com
The 7 Best WalkMe Alternatives in 2023
Its customizable onboarding solutions make it a strong contender for organizations focused on data-driven decision-making. If you're looking for an easy-to-use platform with robust analytics capabilities, Usetiful is worth considering.
Source: helpjuice.com
Top alternatives to UserGuiding
If you are looking for high customizability and excellent customer service all while maintaining a reasonable pricing - Usetiful is the best alternative. At the same time, no onboarding software works exactly the same in every use case. Also make sure to consider the other two alternatives to make an educated decision.
3 free tools for Product Managers to improve product adoption
Product Tours by Usetiful allow you to guide users within your product. You can for example point out interesting parts by well placed smart tips or guide new users with end-to-end walkthrough. Keeping users in direct conversation allows you to get more feedback.
Source: medium.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, CodePen seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 503 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 (503)

View more

Usetiful mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Usetiful yet. Tracking of Usetiful recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

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

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

UserGuiding - Create in-app experiences with the most straightforward product adoption platform — quick implementation, lasting user engagement.

CodeSandbox - Online playground for React

Appcues - Improve user onboarding, feature activation & more — no code required! Stop waiting on dev and start increasing customer engagement today. Try it for free.

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.

Userlane - Digital adoption platform with interactive guidance for software applications allowing anyone to understand and master any software from the get-go.