Netbeans 7 vs Eclipse 3.6 for Java, git and vim

Question

Both of them have a lot of features and are very popular, but which is better?

To reduce subjective answers, please answer this points:

1. Code Refactoring.

2. Unit testing, debugging.

3. Git support.

4. Vim support.(available plugins and their quality, eclim, jVi).

5. Easy of use(theme support, formatting, configuration, other plugins).

6. Maven and Ant support.

7. Web development(glassfish, groove, grails, spring).

8. Desktop app development.(swing, gwt, swt).

9. Mobile development(Android support and other platforms)

10. Game development(which engines have better support, for example Jmonkey uses Netbeans).

11. Bonus question: Support of other languages Python, PHP, C++ and.

For every point that IDE does well, you can give it +1, so in the end:

Netbeans 8

Eclipse 7

Conclusion: Which one is better overall and which you would choose for:

1. Desktop development.
2. Web development.

Additional question:

Which IDE is being used in major companies?(Google uses eclipse, Oracle use Netbeans)

Solution

Note, these are largely my personal opinions; don't take everything too literally.

Eclipse, NetBeans and also IntelliJ IDEA are all very good and capable IDEs. In the end, it doesn't really matter which one you choose; they are all more than good enough for serious professional software development for Java SE and Java EE. I've used all three.

IDEA was tradionally known as the IDE with the best refactoring tools, but the current versions of Eclipse and NetBeans also have very good refactoring tools.

IDEA has built-in Git support. Don't know about Eclipse and NetBeans.

NetBeans and IDEA have very good built-in Maven support. For Eclipse, you need a plug-in (for example m2eclipse) and in my experience it's not as well integrated as in NetBeans and IDEA.

When you get the Java EE package of NetBeans, you get a bundled Glassfish server with it, which is very easy to use. I'm sure that with Eclipse and IDEA you can configure them to use Glassfish too, but it's undoubtedly going to be a little more work to setup than with NetBeans.

NetBeans has a great Swing GUI builder. Eclipse doesn't have a built-in GUI builder, but you can get Google WindowBuilder Pro which supports Swing, SWT and GWT.

The official Android SDK etc. comes with a set of Eclipse tools. IDEA also has support for Android development, but I don't know how good it is.

Last time I tried, the support for other languages than Java (for example, JavaScript) was better in NetBeans than in Eclipse.

As far as I know, Eclipse is still the number one most used Java IDE, but NetBeans and IDEA are also very popular.

For Scala development, IDEA has the best support at the moment in my opinion. The Scala team is working on an Eclipse-based IDE for Scala, but in my experience it is less stable than IDEA's Scala support. For NetBeans, there is a Scala plug-in but only one person seems to be working on it; last time I used it, it was buggy, slow and had memory leaks.

Comments

[Johann du Toit]

Thanks! Was afraid this was going to be another Flame War, +1 for giving a clear question and avoiding wars :D

[Riduidel]

No flame war ? With vim support in modern IDEs ? Just remove that crazy requirement, and I'll be yours !

[Jesper]

Note that the current release version of NetBeans is 6.9.1. NetBeans 7 is in beta.

[Marcus Maxwell]

The current release is RC 2(released today) and there won't be many changes only small bugfixes.

[joschi]

Also make sure to take a look at IntelliJ IDEA. There's also a free version.

[Ivan Nikolchov]

Why is no one mentioning the UI? I find myself disgusted by the look of eclipse and all other eclipse based IDEs. my opinion

[cjstehno]

I agree its largely a personal preference issue. I used NB for years and then Eclipse for years after that. Recently I switched to IntelliJ because it has the best Grails support and I love it. Each IDE has features that I wish were in the others, but use whatever you are most productive with and get really good at using it.