Codesphere vs. GitHub Codespaces: What’s the Difference?

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

Codespaces is an online code editor powered by VSCode specifically designed for Github. With the click of a button directly in your GitHub repository, it starts a remote VM, downloads the code, and lets users edit it with a special version of VSCode, which can be used from the browser.

This is really useful for making quick changes in some repo without the entire setup on your laptop, but it is still limited by the resources of the remote VM and does not solve the complexity of getting a user’s app live.

Codesphere on the other hand aims to provide a much simpler experience compared to today’s cloud providers while giving the opportunity to ad-hoc code in your browser.

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 the full cloud even while you are still coding (e.g. to run builds on hundreds of VM’s or seamlessly switch between dev and prod). Development is always tested and online alongside production. Neither deployment nor git is needed and the application scales automatically.

Starting up with Codesphere is effortless as 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 scalable infrastructure easy to deploy and make starting up projects a lot faster, 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 a gap in the market when it comes to creating scalable apps, and this is why we created Codesphere.