Gitpod is a cloud development environment platform — you push a .gitpod.yml (or devcontainer.json) to a repo, click a button, and get a full ephemeral Linux workspace in the browser or your local VS Code/JetBrains, preconfigured with the tools, services, and ports your project needs. It was one of the earliest serious products in the CDE category.
The original Gitpod Classic was an open-source, Kubernetes-based multi-tenant platform: each workspace was a pod with a containerized VS Code Server, backed by a workspace content sync service and a websocket-based IDE bridge. In 2024 Gitpod introduced Gitpod Flex, a rearchitected product that runs workspaces on dedicated VMs (including inside the customer’s own AWS account) rather than shared Kubernetes nodes, to address the isolation and compliance complaints from larger customers. Workspaces can be prebuilt — Gitpod runs your init commands ahead of time on every commit, so opening one is effectively instant.
It sits in the same category as GitHub Codespaces, Coder, JetBrains Space/Remote Dev, and DevPod. The historical selling point versus Codespaces was being cloud-and-host agnostic; the current selling point versus Coder is the prebuild system and the managed experience. Gitpod Classic is open source (AGPL); Flex is the commercial SaaS/self-hosted product.