As we were recently asked how Codesphere differentiates itself from CodeSandbox, an online editor for web development, we thought we could help clear some things up. If you were ever wondering what makes Codesphere unique, continue reading to find out.

CodeSandbox is a great tool for sandboxing, code interviews, and embedding code snippets into your website. It runs VSCode and even the TypeScript Compiler in your browser — by using browser replacements for the Node.js APIs. This allows CodeSandbox to be scalable because it does not have to provide you with the resources to run VSCode or build your code. All of this work, however, is being done by your browser, and therefore limited by the machine’s resources that are available for it.

Codesphere on the other hand is a brand-new cloud provider for web apps, in which the frontend is an IDE.

The idea behind Codesphere builds on a paradigm shift: Instead of creating apps on your computer and deploying them to a totally different infrastructure (e.g. AWS), you can now create the apps, using Codesphere’s web IDE, in the same environment in which you will run them in production.

Combined with our new distributed architecture, you can now use the power of a full data center even while you are still coding (e.g. to run builds on hundreds of machines or seamlessly switch between dev and prod). There will be no more “works on my machine” and much more of leveraging productivity. While Codesphere lives in your browser it provides seamless collaboration by allowing users to collaborate in real-time with friends, right in the IDE.

Starting up with Codesphere is effortless BUT it provides you with everything needed to change the deployment or even take out the code without any lock-in. On the other hand, if you prefer your local VSCode, you can just mount the remote file system and work with that, getting the best of both worlds. We make it easy to build web apps for scale, regardless if you are a single developer or a team.

Codesphere grows with you, from your very first experiments to building the next Spotify or Youtube.

While there are really great tools out there, we felt there is something missing in the market when it comes to creating scalable apps, and this is why we created Codesphere.