Coder Premium Edition

What do you like best about the product?

The really cool thing about coder (to me) is how quickly the workspace spins up. You just click and it is right there with a full configuration environment. No waiting for dependencies to be downloaded. It’s almost as if my local machine isn’t capable of breaking today. Also our non-technical folks can easily manage workspaces and templates using the dashboards provided by coder.

What do you dislike about the product?

Multi-org configurations will take some time to figure out and while it’s certainly possible to do these things, they aren’t beginner friendly. Pricing is reasonable until additional users are added or you increase your compute load and then it seems like a whole different amount of money at the end of each month. In addition to having an unpredictable cost associated with coder, the dashboard becomes somewhat clumsy when attempting to manage multiple workspace templates simultaneously. It doesn’t break down however; it’s simply less than intuitive.

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

Coder essentially eliminated two major pain points in my team. We were spending way too much time trying to resolve “it works on my machine” issues. With coder we’ve been able to eliminate both of those completely. New developers are now able to get up and running in minutes rather than days. Furthermore, since all development environments are stored centrally on coder, we’ve removed source code from local laptops thereby satisfying our security teams requirements. Not sexy, but that is exactly where the value lies.

What do you like best about the product?

I use Coder to build 'golden' environments using Docker images for our backend engineering developers. The terraform native approach is the killer feature. I appreciate that Coder is open source with Apache 2.0 and self-hosted, allowing it to run on infrastructure we control. The IDE agnostic angle is nice too. Onboarding new developers has sped up dramatically, dropping from days to minutes, and it eliminates issues like 'my local setup is broken.' Coder offers consistent CI/CD parity and provides cloud compute on demand. I really enjoy the tight integration with Git, the Kubernetes-native approach, and the ability to integrate tools with HashiCorp Vault. Using pre-built images allows our CI to build development images with all dependencies.

What do you dislike about the product?

Stateful workflows struggle with Coder as Coder environments are ephemeral by design. As everything runs remotely, bad internet could lead to a bad experience. Costs can be surprising if not managed properly, and adoption can be harder for some developers. The quick start setup is fairly easy, but using it at platform level is moderately difficult, as you need to create workspace templates using Docker images, and bad images could result in slow experiences. Running setup on Kubernetes, especially AWS EKS, can also be a bit tricky. The most difficult part is setting up networking, for example, trying to access private APIs inside the VPC.

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

I use Coder to create consistent developer environments quickly, reducing onboarding from days to minutes and solving local setup issues. It provides on-demand cloud compute and avoids 'works on my machine' problems by keeping environments consistent and off-laptops.

What do you like best about the product?

I like that launching terminal and the development server are at the same location that I can click and open.

What do you dislike about the product?

For someone who has no engineering background, coder didn't really help me better understand the background and relationship between terminal and server. Instead of pushing the code to staging server, I was directly pushing to production server.

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

Coder solves the need for me to start localhost through a terminal. Save me some time, but its questionable how much more value it truly brings for me.

What do you like best about the product?

Feature sets that allow me to do agentic development

What do you dislike about the product?

Relatively heavy infrastructure and somewhat hard to build

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

Standard Terraform-based workflows that allow me to build efficiently

What do you like best about the product?

I use Coder primarily as a nice, simple WebUI to launch Terraform, and I like that it isn't too heavily opinionated. Coder allows me to instantly spin up a virtual machine based on templates generated with Hashicorp Packer or container images for a wide variety of uses. I appreciate being able to effortlessly create environments to test things out, and it's great for working on complex tasks from a variety of workstations. It's especially beneficial for giving a team the ability to create cyber environments in a repeatable and centrally managed way. I also enjoy how it efficiently handles resource utilization by turning off workspaces that I am not actively using. The initial setup was incredibly easy, and while I had to learn Terraform, the effort was well worth the reward. I recommend Coder all the time.

What do you dislike about the product?

One of my primary use cases is to create Apache Guacamole connections. These connections are created as soon as the IP address is accessible by Terraform, but I do not have a way to present the connection to the user until after the agent is running. I would love a way to have apps at the 'workspace' level so they are available as soon as Terraform knows about them instead of needing to wait on the Coder agent. The Coder agent actually isn't necessary for the majority of my use cases, and adding this would allow me to simplify my templates and further improve usability.

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

I use Coder to instantly spin up VMs for various tasks, manage resources efficiently, and provide repeatable cyber environments. It's a simple WebUI for Terraform, enhancing security with strong passwords and enabling seamless RDP and SSH connections via Apache Guacamole.