CodeCanvas 2025.1 With Free Tier and Toolbox Support

In April, we released CodeCanvas 2025.1 with many important changes. The release brings improved infrastructure flexibility for easier multi-region setups, a new AWS CloudFormation installation option, enhanced environment logs, and more. Today, we want to highlight two major updates: See the full What’s New for the full details. Use CodeCanvas for free With the 2025.1 […]

May 13, 2025 - 12:36

CodeCanvas 2025.1 With Free Tier and Toolbox Support

In April, we released CodeCanvas 2025.1 with many important changes. The release brings improved infrastructure flexibility for easier multi-region setups, a new AWS CloudFormation installation option, enhanced environment logs, and more.

Today, we want to highlight two major updates:

The introduction of the CodeCanvas Free tier makes it easier to try cloud development environments before committing.
Support for JetBrains Toolbox as a launcher for dev environments.

See the full What’s New for the full details.

Use CodeCanvas for free

With the 2025.1 release, you can use CodeCanvas without buying a license.

Why have we introduced the Free tier?

By introducing CodeCanvas Free, we invite you to try cloud development environments (CDEs) to solve common problems like long onboarding times, complex local setups, and machine performance limitations at no cost. We want more teams to experience faster development without infrastructure getting in the way.

Free vs. Professional

The Free tier includes all core features needed for remote development: creating an unlimited number of users, CDEs, and CDE templates; support for JetBrains IDEs and VS Code; GPU support within the CDEs; the warm-up and standby pool features for fast CDE startup; and many more.

CodeCanvas Free	CodeCanvas Professional
•Unlimited users •Unlimited dev environments and templates •Instant access to environments with warm-up and standby pools •VS Code and JetBrains IDE integration •Sysbox support for enhanced container security •GPU support •Multirepository dev environments	•All the features of the free license •Environment cleanup policies for cost optimization •Snapshot-based storage optimization •Copy-paste restrictions •User group and role management •Unlimited computing platforms to support multiple instance locations •Priority support

However, some enterprise-level features are not available or are limited in the Free tier:

Infrastructure limitation: You can connect only one Kubernetes cluster to run CDEs, so you can’t create multiregion setups and separate workloads between clusters.
Security management: You can’t create User Groups, Custom Roles, or restrict copy-paste inside CDEs.
Cleanup policies: Features like automated deletion of unused CDEs or snapshotting inactive CDE volumes are unavailable. These are especially useful for saving cloud costs at scale.

These features are marked in the UI with the Pro badge. More details can be found in our documentation and on the CodeCanvas page.

How to get CodeCanvas Free

You can request a CodeCanvas Free license by filling out the form on the official website. Once approved, you can start using CodeCanvas Free without any payments or time limits.

Launch CDEs with JetBrains Toolbox

With this release, you can use JetBrains Toolbox to launch and manage your CodeCanvas dev environments, in addition to JetBrains Gateway.

Why Toolbox?

Most JetBrains users already have JetBrains Toolbox installed. So, for many developers, asking them to install another dedicated app like Gateway just to launch remote environments feels redundant. Toolbox is designed to be a central hub for all development work, local or remote. Adding support for remote environments is a natural evolution.

This isn’t just about CodeCanvas. Starting with version 2.6, Toolbox supports a growing number of remote development providers, including SSH, Coder, Gitpod, and now CodeCanvas. It’s part of JetBrains’ long-term strategy to make remote development a first-class experience across our ecosystem.

What it means

If you already have JetBrains Toolbox installed, you can now open your remote environments directly through it. Toolbox will automatically download the matching JetBrains Client and connect to the remote IDE. More details can be found in the CodeCanvas documentation.

Important: Toolbox integration is currently in Beta and requires Toolbox version 2.6 or later.

What can CodeCanvas do for your team?

Want to learn more about the benefits of CDEs and whether they’re right for your organization? Check out some of our recent posts:

Try CodeCanvas Free today

CodeCanvas is an on-premises solution, so you’ll need to install it on your cloud infrastructure.

Launch the installation (AWS account required)
Follow the installation instructions
Get a free license

For other cloud types, please consult the installation instructions in our documentation.