Workspaces

CodeSandbox uses Workspaces to provide personal and collaborative experiences. Each workspace could be a Personal Workspace or a Team Workspace. You can think of workspaces as the boundaries for collaboration on CodeSandbox: use a Personal Workspace for focused, individual development work, and use a Team Workspace for collaboration with others.

Every Sandbox belongs to a workspace, and every branch of a Repository has a separate development environment in each workspace. If you are working on something in your Personal Workspace and decide to collaborate with others, it may be necessary to transfer (in the case of a Sandbox) or re-import (in the case of a Repository) your work to a Team Workspace.

Personal Workspace

By default, when you set up an account, you have a free personal workspace. This is a private space to create, prototype and build anything you like. You can think of this workspace as your local development transferred to the cloud. The personal workspace contains any public Sandboxes and Repositories you added while active in your workspace.

Sandboxes: Your personal workspace contains any Sandboxes created while that workspace was active. You can make these Sandboxes unlisted or private (with a Personal Pro subscription) to work in secret. To collaborate with others, you will have to transfer the Sandbox to a team workspace that includes your collaboration partners.

Repositories: Personal workspaces also contain any Repositories that were imported while that workspace was active. You can import private Repositories (with a Personal Pro subscription) to work in secret. To collaborate with others, you will have to re-import the Repository to a team workspace that includes your collaboration partners.

Your personal workspace also contains a section for your open source contributions.

Personal Pro

By upgrading to Personal Pro, you can expand your personal development experience in a number of ways:

Add Private Sandboxes and Repositories

Personal Pro allows you to import your private Repositories and mark your Sandboxes as unlisted or private. This accelerates your personal and professional endevours by extending access to your work beyond your local machine while keeping the code secure.

Access more VM Resources

Depending on the size of your projects, you may need an increase in memory, disk space, and processing power. Personal Pro provides this increase so that you can work without friction.

Learn more about subscription differences on our pricing page (opens in a new tab).

Team Workspace

Team workspaces are where collaboration happens. If you want to work together with a friend or colleague on a Sandbox or Repository, start by creating a team and inviting them to join you.

Sandboxes: Anyone with write access to the team workspace can edit its Sandboxes. If you want to collaborate live with team members, you can start a live session (with a Team Pro subscription).

Repositories: Similarly, anyone with write access to the team workspace can edit its Repositories — as long as they also have write access to the Repository on the git provider (such as GitHub). Branches have their own development environments for each workspace, so files saved on my-branch of a repository in your personal workspace will not appear on my-branch in the team workspace until they are committed and pushed to the git provider.

Creating a Team

Creating a team is free and simple. You can create a team when you sign up:

Or create a team from the workspace selector:

Inviting People to a Team

Team size varies depending on the subscription. Free teams may have up to 5 editors while Team Pro can have up to 20 editors. If you need more than 20 editors, please contact us for a customized plan that fits your needs.

You can invite others by entering the email address that is connected to their account. They will get a notification (the bell icon in the header) in CodeSandbox and an email when invited to a new team. From there, they can accept or decline the invitation.

You can also invite team members that do not have a CodeSandbox account. They will be sent an email inviting them to create an account where they will have access to the team.

Team member invites can be sent during the team creation flow or anytime after through the team settings page.

Managing Teams and Subscriptions

You can create and manage teams from the dashboard Settings page. To find this, select your workspace and open the Subscription page.

Here you can see the team overview with subscription details, team members and roles. Admins can edit team member access and roles here as well as edit the subscription.

Free Team

Free Teams are a great way to get started with collaboration and test out team features. Free teams can work with public Sandboxes and Repositories, access the team workspace dashboard and synchronously work on branches together.

Team Pro

Team Pro opens the doors to full-scale team development by allowing access to private repositories and sandboxes. It also has better VM specs for a smooth experience working with large or complex codebases.

Team Pro Trials

If you aren't sure if Team Pro is right for you, you can start a free trial, allowing you and your team to try out Team Pro for free before making the jump.

Collaboration on Teams

Sharing Sandboxes

You can choose which team you're in from the team drop-down at the top-left on the dashboard. You can create new sandboxes directly from here or from a different team, select one or more sandboxes, right-click and select 'Move to Folder', where you can choose the team and folder you want to move them into. All sandboxes in a team can be seen or edited by other team members, depending on their permission levels. We keep track of who created the sandbox, though, and only the original creator of the sandbox can delete it.

Collaborating on Sandboxes

You and other members of a workspace can open a sandbox at the same time and see each other's cursor to work together. You can still invite other people who aren't members of the team to the sandbox or host a live session.

Collaborating on Repositories

While Sandboxes belong to only one workspace, Repositories can exist in multiple workspaces at once. This means that users with write access to a repository may import it to their personal workspace while another team may import the same repository to work on it together.

Live collaboration on branches is restricted to members of the same workspace. If you don't see your collaboration partners working, you may be looking at the same branch in a different workspace. Otherwise, your work will be visible in every workspace as soon as it is committed and pushed to the git provider.