Please do not read this article. I had no idea what I was talking about back in 2020. There are a lot of false, misleading and outdated comments about both GitHub & Gitpod, so please read Gitpod’s Codespaces vs Gitpod comparison instead.

GitHub Codespaces

Codespaces are awesome. They are one of the coolest GitHub products in my opinion. They offer a very familiar experience to VS Code and GitHub.

• (+) All your VS Code stuff gets synced
• (+) You can use all the VS Code keyboard shortcuts
• (+) You can have setup scripts with a dotfiles repo (see mine for some inspiration)
• (-) You only get about 4 GB of RAM (should be enough in most circumstances though)
• (-) You are limited to 5 active Codespaces

Gitpod

Gitpod is quite a nice alternative to Codespaces. With their browser extension, it is fairly simple to open a repo in your browser and start working. I am running the Jekyll Admin server on Gitpod for writing this article!

• (+) You get a whopping 60 GB of RAM
• (+) You can install your extensions just for a single project, or for your whole account
• (+) You can have as many projects as you want, but they will be deleted after 10 days of inactivity (shouldn’t generally be a problem)
• (-) You can download a limited amount of extensions
• (-) You have to enable autosave for every project manually
• (-) There is a timeout for the IDE