Comparison · written plainly
No account.
No pen to save.
CodePen is a good place to publish a demo and find other people’s. CodeRush is for the other half of the day: the sketch you want to run right now, privately, with nothing to sign up for. Here is the difference, stated fairly.
- No sign-up, no profile
- Nothing uploaded to run
- Sharing by link, not by hosting
The short version
Same box, different contract.
| Getting started | No account, no profile, no project to create. Open the page and paste. |
|---|---|
| Where code runs | In your browser, in a sandboxed frame with an opaque origin. Nothing is uploaded to render it. |
| Formats | HTML, JavaScript, TypeScript, JSX, TSX, Markdown, SVG, XML, CSS and JSON, detected automatically. |
| Saving | Up to 24 named snapshots in this browser, pinnable, exportable as one JSON backup. No cloud copy. |
| Sharing | A Rush link carries the source in the URL fragment. Public, private or password-protected; no server file, and no remote revoke. |
| AI help | Optional, with your own API key, sent directly to the provider you pick when you press Send. |
| Community | None. No feed, no follows, no discovery. |
What CodeRush does not do
The honest column.
There is no hosted pen: nothing you make here gets a permanent public URL on our servers, because nothing you make here reaches our servers. There are no user profiles, no collaboration, no comments and no embeds for your blog. There is no package installer and no asset hosting, and there is no team plan, because there are no accounts to put in a team.
A shared link cannot be revoked later, for the same structural reason: there is no stored copy to delete. Local snapshots live in one browser, so clearing site data clears them — export the JSON backup if they matter. If what you need is a public, durable, embeddable demo with a comment thread under it, a hosted service is the right tool and this is not it.
What it does instead
The trade, stated as a trade.
It starts instantly and asks for nothing. It runs ten kinds of source with one detector, so pasting a README, an API response, a component and a stylesheet into the same box all work. It refuses to contact another host until you allow it, and it can render a page offline with no scripts at all, which makes it a reasonable place to open code you have not read.
Its privacy claim is tested rather than asserted: a test in the public repository records every request the page makes from load through render and fails if any request is not a same-origin GET, or if any request carries your source. The privacy notes show you how to confirm it yourself in a minute with your own developer tools.
And it is small enough to keep close: a Chrome extension for code blocks you are already reading, and a local service that renders source to a PNG for agents.
Questions
- Is CodeRush free?
- Yes, and there is nothing to sign up for. AI editing is optional and uses your own provider key.
- Can I import my existing pens?
- There is no importer. Copy the source into the pad and it runs; save it as a local snapshot or a link.
- Can I embed a CodeRush snippet in my blog?
- No. There are no embeds. A Rush link opens in the reader’s own tab and runs there.
- Does my code stay private?
- It stays in your browser unless you create a share link or send an AI request. A test in the repository asserts that no request carries your source.