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GraphQL Playground VS CodePen

Compare GraphQL Playground VS CodePen and see what are their differences

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GraphQL Playground logo GraphQL Playground

GraphQL IDE for better development workflows

CodePen logo CodePen

A front end web development playground.
  • GraphQL Playground Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-09
  • CodePen Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30

GraphQL Playground features and specs

  • Interactive Interface
    GraphQL Playground provides a user-friendly, interactive interface for exploring and testing GraphQL queries and mutations. This allows developers to quickly experiment with their GraphQL API.
  • Auto-Completion and Syntax Highlighting
    It offers auto-completion and syntax highlighting which increases productivity by helping developers write correct GraphQL queries faster.
  • Built-in Documentation
    The built-in documentation explorer helps developers easily navigate and understand the GraphQL schemas, types, and fields available in their API.
  • Real-time Error Feedback
    Provides real-time error feedback, making it easier to identify and fix issues while writing queries, resulting in smoother development workflows.
  • Request History
    GraphQL Playground maintains a history of queries and mutations executed, allowing developers to quickly revisit and reuse previous work.
  • Customizable Settings
    It is highly customizable, allowing developers to set endpoint URLs, headers, and other configurations to match various environments (development, staging, production).

Possible disadvantages of GraphQL Playground

  • Performance
    GraphQL Playground can be resource-intensive, consuming significant amounts of memory and CPU, which might slow down the development environment, especially with large schemas.
  • Security Concerns
    As an interactive playground embedded in web interfaces, it may expose sensitive data or operations if not properly secured, necessitating careful configuration and access control.
  • Limited Offline Use
    Since it relies on an active endpoint to fetch schema details and execute queries, its utility is limited when working offline.
  • Deprecated Maintenance
    As of 2020, the GraphQL Playground repository is not actively maintained anymore, which means it may not receive updates, bug fixes, or new features.
  • Complex Configuration
    In comparison to simpler alternatives, setting up and configuring GraphQL Playground can be more complex and time-consuming.

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.

GraphQL Playground videos

Graphql playground review completa parte 1

More videos:

  • Review - Create Local GraphQL Playground
  • Review - Graphql playground review completa parte 2

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 GraphQL Playground and CodePen)
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Text Editors
0 0%
100% 100
GraphQL
100 100%
0% 0
Programming
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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GraphQL Playground Reviews

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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 GraphQL Playground. While we know about 502 links to CodePen, we've tracked only 12 mentions of GraphQL Playground. 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.

GraphQL Playground mentions (12)

  • Show HN: API Parrot – Automatically Reverse Engineer HTTP APIs"
    Have you tried something like GraphQL playground before? https://github.com/graphql/graphql-playground There's other tools out there that can generate similar docs or playgrounds, given you have a schema/spec of some type. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Exploring GraphiQL 2 Updates and New Features
    GraphiQL is a tool that was created to help developers explore GraphQL APIs, maintained by the GraphQL Foundation. But when GraphiQL became more and more popular, developers started to create additional GraphQL IDEs. A good example of this was GraphQL Playground, which quickly became the most popular GraphQL IDE. It was loosely based on GraphiQL, but had more features and a better UI. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Why Is It So Important To Go To Meetups
    I went to a GraphQL meetup and they used the gql playground and a similar schema generator to what I was using, and it made me feel relevant. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
  • GraphQL subscriptions at scale with NATS
    Here, we'll create a simple GraphQL server and subscribe to a subject from our resolver. We'll use GraphQL playground to mock client side behavior. Once we're connected we'll use NATS CLI to send a payload to our subject and see the changes on the client. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
  • GraphQL vs REST in .NET Core
    Now we can consume created GraphQL API. In the GitHub Repo same functionality has been added with REST approach and GraphQL endpoint. Also widely used Swagger configured for Web API Endpoints as well as AltairUI added for GraphQL endpoint testing. Naturally, AltairUI it not a must for GraphQL, you can also use Swagger, GraphiQL, or GraphQL Playground. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
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CodePen mentions (502)

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What are some alternatives?

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

How to GraphQL - Open-source tutorial website to learn GraphQL development

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

GraphQl Editor - Editor for GraphQL that lets you draw GraphQL schemas using visual nodes

CodeSandbox - Online playground for React

Stellate.co - Everything you need to run your GraphQL API at scale

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.