Coder Community Edition

What do you like best about the product?

The sandboxed environment gave our team an out-of-the-box coding solution, with everything configured from the get-go. Since the sandbox also supports local use of IDEs—VS Code in our case—it provided a solid UI/UX experience as well.

What do you dislike about the product?

The fact that it’s not truly local means the integration with the source system isn’t as strong as it could be. I understand that this is its primary objective, but in exceptional use cases and specific requirements it still doesn’t support integrating with the source system. Also, while the experience feels local, it’s still not truly local in practice, and the performance in particular leaves a lot to be desired.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Coder specifically solved our developer provisioning problem, especially in a workplace where security and a unified environment are important concerns. It gave us a sandboxed environment that helped address those needs.

What do you like best about the product?

I used Coder for a fintech startup that required strict security capabilities and isolation. Coder provided us with a sandbox environment, which was crucial since we couldn't set up anything locally. Having a ready-to-go workspace for coding was a plus because it had all the requirements set up right from the start. This avoided the common 'it works on my machine' issue, allowing everyone to have the same setup, which definitely increased productivity. Also, compared to GitHub Workspaces, Coder performed quite better, especially with its management of the sandbox environment.

What do you dislike about the product?

I didn't really understand the problem Coder was trying to solve with the AI and Coder agents they added later on. It just didn't resonate with its original positioning of being an isolated coding environment for security-sensitive teams. Additionally, it's still not a near-native experience, as much as they try to sell it that way. Coding on a native application is smoother and more customizable. We had expectations within the team to have the same setup, so we didn't use customizable shells or commands beyond what everyone agreed on. Also, there were latency concerns, which affected the experience. Setting up Coder was a bit confusing at first, though not overly hard, I'd rate it a six out of ten for initial setup ease.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Coder provided a secure sandbox environment, ensuring compliance and consistency across all developers' setups. It increased productivity by having uniform workspaces and outperformed similar tools in latency. However, its move towards AI didn't resonate with my needs.

What do you like best about the product?

The flexibility and control it gives us to create and manage secure workspaces from templates. It also has a skill where I can give you my coding agent; apart from that, self-hosting was a big plus for our use case.

What do you dislike about the product?

There are not enough ready-to-use templates; I have to create and customise my template from scratch, which has a learning curve. Also, optimising that template has taken a lot of my time.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Coder helps us quickly create isolated coding workspaces for our AI interviews usecases. It makes it easier to give candidates a consistent and secure setup without managing each environment manually.

What do you like best about the product?

- Templates declared in Git
- Polished UI, easy on new users coming from a Data Science focused industry
- Templates are fully customizable, easy to enforce governance
- Sandboxed environment for AI agents
- Control plane/workspaces are separated, ease of maintenance
- Integrates with a Kubernetes-native environment

What do you dislike about the product?

- Security when "inside" a workspace requires much setup effort from systems external to Coder. For instance Istio for network isolation, cloud-based secrets manager for user secrets management etc.
- External Authentication for Github needs too much permission scope over an organization. The Github app should only be used for authentication, further scope should follow user's own permissions defined by the org.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

As part of a platform dev team, Coder provides the flexibility for us to unify the development stack for non-technical users, while also allowing them to test their software in a way that is similar to an actual production setup

What do you like best about the product?

I like the extensive documentation and guides provided by the coder team, combined with general configuration features of the platform.

What do you dislike about the product?

End-user education and onboarding could be better, or better integrated into the platform.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Solved issues with getting developers access to the tooling that they need to work, and solved easily managing and monitoring those resources in a consolidated fashion.