CodePen: the playground where front-end ideas come to life
If you’re someone who loves building things for the web—whether you’re a designer, developer, or a curious tinkerer—CodePen is one of the best places to create, test, and discover front-end magic.
It’s more than just an editor; it’s a social space where you can experiment, learn, and get inspired.
They call it “social” for a reason. CodePen is powered by a community that openly shares its work.
Most Pens are public and open source, meaning anyone can view them, comment on them, fork them, remix them, or learn from them.
It’s a place where ideas constantly evolve because people build on each other’s creativity.
Build & Test
Whether you’re prototyping a new animation or building a complete project, CodePen helps you work faster.
You can keep things public to share your progress, or switch to a PRO plan if you prefer to keep your experiments private.
Learn & Discover
Want to improve your skills or push yourself creatively? CodePen Challenges give you fresh prompts to build something new each week.
They often feature standout Pens on the homepage and across social channels—great for visibility and motivation.
Share Your Work
When you’re ready to showcase your ideas, CodePen makes it effortless.
Presenting at an event? Use Presentation Mode to show your code and live results directly in the browser. It’s one of the most vibrant communities for front-end folks, with over 1.8 million creators posting and exploring.
Why CodePen feels so good to use
A front-end environment built for experimentation
The editor is fast, customizable, and developer-friendly.
You get:
- Autocomplete & Emmet
- Smart defaults for starting new projects
- Preprocessors if you love Sass, Pug, Babel, etc.
Keep things private when you need to
Private Pens stay completely hidden behind unguessable URLs. No search engines, no indexing—just your eyes until you decide otherwise.
Embed Pens anywhere
Would you like to showcase your demo on your site? Embed it and customize the look. Change your site theme later? Your embeds update automatically.
Asset Hosting
No more hunting for random hosting to use an image or JSON file. Drag and drop your assets directly into CodePen—they’ll host it all.
Build full projects
CodePen Projects is a full IDE right in your browser. You get:
- Live previews
- Automatic preprocessing
- Easy deployment
- Drag-and-drop uploads
…everything you need to build real websites without leaving the platform.
Collab Mode
Need to pair-code? Collab Mode lets multiple people write in the same Pen simultaneously—everyone sees changes in real time, including the live preview.
CodePen isn’t just a tool—it’s a creative home for anyone exploring the front-end world. Whether you’re experimenting, learning, teaching, or showcasing, it provides everything you need in one simple, inspiring space.
