Coder vs. Gitpod: Which is better for your team?

author avatar
Ben Potter
  
author avatar
Mark Milligan
 on January 18th, 2022
Updated on December 19th, 2022
6 min read

Gitpod and Coder both provide developers with reproducible, powerful, cloud-based developer environments or workspaces, but they differ dramatically in their target audience: While Gitpod appears to be focused on individuals or small teams by way of a SaaS offering only, Coder is focused on making cloud development available to the enterprise, with a self-hosted on-premises and public cloud solution.

Here's how to choose the best fit for your development team.

Why remote development

Today most developers have their IDEs on their local machines. There is a growing interest in moving development workspaces and IDEs to the cloud, which solves some key problems for organizations while also offering advantages for the developer:

Gitpod: Easy to get started, but only hosted SaaS

Gitpod is very focused on the developer experience. Getting started with Gitpod is easy. In fact you can launch a new workspace for a project by navigating to https://gitpod.io/#repo-url. Like Coder, they developed (and open-sourced) a fork of VS Code suited for the web browser. Using a familiar IDE makes it simpler for developers to transition to remote development, since they do not need to learn new shortcuts, extensions, etc. Gitpod also supports different IDEs beyond VS Code in the web browser. Developers can choose between VS Code (Web), VS Code (Local), and beta support for IntelliJ IDEs to write code.

Gitpod’s opinionated model for development environments can work well for new projects and small teams building web applications. All workspaces are ephemeral, run in containers, and new workspaces can be created for each task (feature, bugfix, code review) a developer does.

There is a growing list of hosted SaaS offerings from larger, more established suppliers like GitHub Codespaces, Amazon CodeCatalyst, Microsoft Dev Box, and soon GitLab.

Coder: Supporting enterprises, on their infrastructure

While Gitpod has a single-tenant SaaS offering option, it has discontinued support for a self-hosted offering like Coder. Coder continues to only be a self-hosted offering because our target customers, larger enterprises, prefer this flexibility and security to run Coder on-premises or in their public cloud.

One example is multi-cluster and workspace infrastructure support. With Coder, workspaces can be provisioned on whatever Kubernetes, Docker or VM infrastructure you prefer, so developers can develop remotely with low-latency wherever they are on the globe. This is particularly useful for organizations that may have teams of developers that are geographically distributed. Coder supports other enterprise-grade features such as built-in single-sign-on, an audit log, configurable workspace resources, quotas, and usage metrics.

Coder supports different types of workspace infrastructure. While Coder can run on Kubernetes, it is not required. Coder also runs on Docker and VMs. The Coder control plane can also run on a laptop, a VM or Kubernetes.

Enterprises can confidently deploy Coder at scale in their organization, measure its adoption, and configure their deployment to match requirements for different teams.

With that being said, the developer experience with Coder is not an afterthought. Coder supports multiple IDEs, full Linux desktop, container and VM development (including Windows and Visual Studio or macOS), GPU support, REST access, CLI access, and personalization to enable developers and teams to move their existing workflows to remote workspaces.

Coder Gitpod
Try in seconds (laptop)
Try in seconds (cloud SaaS)
SaaS version
Self-host (Docker)
Self-host (Kubernetes)
Self-host (Multi-region)
Organizations/teams
SSO Support
Usage metrics
Audit log
Configurable workspace resources and limits
GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket integration
Use VS Code IDEs
Use JetBrains IDEs
Custom apps and IDEs
Docker in workspaces
GPUs in workspaces
Configure workspace images and templates
Workspace pre-builds
Workspace snapshots
CLI
REST API
Collaboration via third-party
IDE extensions

This table was last updated on 12/19/2022. Please contact us if you find inaccuracies or missing information.

Next steps

See our documentation or sign up for a trial. You can also request a demo of Coder or request to speak with Sales about licensing and pricing.

Gitpod is also easy to try, you can try their SaaS

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