CodePen — free plan, limits and what it is good for
Best free place to sketch front-end ideas. Free accounts can only publish public pens, which is fine for demos and bad for client work.
| Pricing | Free; Pro from $8/mo |
|---|---|
| Free tier | Unlimited public pens |
| Account required | Email or GitHub |
| Watermark on free output | No |
| Limits | No private pens, no asset hosting, no collab mode |
| Platforms | Web |
| Best for | Front-end experiments, CSS demos, code sharing |
| Last checked | October 2026 |
What the free plan actually gives you
You get a full HTML/CSS/JS editor with live preview, preprocessors, and instant shareable URLs, at no cost, as long as everything is public. The public-only rule is the entire trade: your pen is indexed and forkable by anyone.
That makes it ideal for demos, teaching and bug reproduction, and unsuitable for anything under NDA. If you need a private pen, the free alternatives are a local editor or a private GitHub repo with Pages disabled.
Where it breaks
- Everything you save is public and forkable
- No private pens without Pro
- Asset hosting and collab are paid features
What we would use instead
If the limits above are a problem, the closest free substitutes are GitHub and DevDocs. They are not identical — each one trades something different — but all of them let you finish a job without paying.
Free alternatives
Questions people actually ask
Can I keep a pen private for free?
No, private pens require Pro. Drafts are unlisted but still public once saved.
Does CodePen own my code?
No, you retain ownership, but you grant them a licence to display and distribute it as part of the public pen.
Can I embed a pen on my site?
Yes, embedding is free on public pens and is the usual way to show live demos in a blog post.