NetBeans vs IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition

Question

I used NetBeans for Java development, and I find quite good. But still, I continue to look for better opportunities, and I stumbled upon "free" version of IntelliJ IDEA.

So, my question: Is that IntelliJ "Community Edition" more powerfull than NetBeans, and if yes, how? Is it worth spending time to learn it?

Solution 1

Just go ahead and use IntelliJ for a week. If you love it, you love it.

In the beginning, one of the point people often raised about IntelliJ is that you don't have to learn it. It just helps you when and where you need it. It's almost as if the designers of the IDE are also programmers and they know what we really want.

Most of these helps are preverved today (and copied by Eclipse and Netbeans). So I don't think your experiment with IntelliJ will be wasting a lot of your time, even if in the end you decide against it.

And it's going to be an absolute shame if IBM and Oracle crushed IntelliJ. They are the cooperations that patent things like how to draw a line on screen, yet they have no conscience whatsoever when it comes to blatantly copysteal legitimate innovations from a small company in Russia. It's not like IntellJ can launch a legal battle against these two giants, that's suicidal.

So as a programmer myself, I appeal to all programmers to ditch Eclipse and Netbeans.

Solution 2

I don't know how to quantity "better" or "more powerful" than anyone else here, but I can endorse IntelliJ. I would say it's definitely worth learning. I buy a personal license every year. It pays for itself many times over.

Solution 3

I'd check out the feature matrix here first, and check to make sure the technologies/frameworks are either supported in the community edition, or you can live without IDE support. I can say, personally, the lack of Grails support in the community edition is what's preventing me from switching, so check out the list first and make sure you're happy with what it provides.