Eclipse vs. IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Eclipse	Score 8.2 out of 10	N/A	Eclipse is a free and open source integrated development environment (IDE).	N/A
IntelliJ IDEA	Score 9.3 out of 10	N/A	IntelliJ IDEA is an IDE that aims to give Java and Kotlin developers everything they need out of the box, including a smart code editor, built-in developer tools, framework support, database support, web development support, and much more.	$16.90 per month

Pricing

Eclipse

IntelliJ IDEA

Editions & Modules

No answers on this topic

For Individual Use: $16.90
per month
All Products Pack (For Individual Use): $28.90
per month
For Organizations: $59.90
per month
All Products Pack (For Organizations): $77.90
per month

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Eclipse	IntelliJ IDEA
Free Trial
No	Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No	Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

—

Yearly subscriptions: For Individual Use – $169 /1st year, $ 135 /2nd year and $ 101 /3d year onwards For Organizations – $599 /1st year, $479 /2nd year and $ 359 /3rd year onwards All Products Pack (For Individual Use) – $289 /1st year, $ 231 /2nd year and $ 173 /3d year onwards All Products Pack (For Organizations) – $799 /1st year, $623 /2nd year and $ 467 /3rd year onwards

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Eclipse	IntelliJ IDEA
Considered Both Products	Eclipse Jonah Dempcy Web & Mobile Developer Chose Eclipse NetBeans is the closest competitor I've found to Eclipse for Java development. IntelliJ IDEA is good as well but it isn't free. NetBeans is a free competitor that has split the Java community, and a lot of it comes down to preference, like the famous vim vs. emacs wars. I would … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Team Lead Chose Eclipse Compared to IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse is free of charge and that is the main advantage for me. Over the time I got used to Eclipse, I didn't want to switch even though I could, because all I need is there and it works like a charm. Compared to NetBeans, I found the community of … Incentivized Helpful? Nikhil Puniyani Senior Software Engineer In Test Chose Eclipse 1. Eclipse is easy to use. 2. when you are new to building something you can go for Eclipse as it provides a clean UI. 3. Provide support to connect with other tools and technology. Incentivized Helpful? EG Eddie Galvez Chief Architect Chose Eclipse IntelliJ is a good IDE as well. Any motivated user can't go wrong focusing on one and then deeply learning it, and it will pay off in productivity. Note of course that one is free the other is not! I find Eclipse is stronger at managing very large projects. Incentivized Helpful? Tharsanan Kurukulasingam Software Engineer Chose Eclipse Eclipse is far better than NetBeans. But when compared to IntellijIdea Eclipse is a good choice when it comes to handling large projects and costs. Eclipse has room to improve on its UI and IntelliSense. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Employee Chose Eclipse Eclipse stands out with its feature set, reliability, and being completely free of charge. I have previously used NetBeans but had reliability issues with it, at least on Windows version. IDEA has modern UI and is significantly more user friendly than Eclipse; however, the free … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Analyst Chose Eclipse [In my opinion,] Eclipse is the worst IDE for java right now. Incentivized Helpful? Xialin Zhu Engineering Manager Chose Eclipse They are both great IDEs and we use both. IntelliJ may have a larger community so there are more plugins available, which means it could be a better choice for some specific types of projects. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Analyst Chose Eclipse As previously said, Eclipse is one of the most complete and useful tools for Java development. And as a plus, it's open-source and free, so you won't beat that price-quality relation. When starting with Java projects, you won't fail with Eclipse. But, if you are getting into … Incentivized Helpful? Rajshekhar Sahu Student Chose Eclipse As compared to NetBeans, Eclipse is much faster. NetBeans needs to have JDK 1.8 which sometimes creates problems if your system already has a higher version installed, besides it has a glassfish server which is hard to configure. Integration of MySQL or other database is … Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose Eclipse First thing, Eclipse is free. So zero cost as compared to other alternatives. Eclipse has tons of tools/plugins for better development/testing, helping devs, making their lives easier. Incentivized Helpful? KV Kunal Verma Software Engineer Chose Eclipse Eclipse offers all the features in the other IDEs but without any cost. It also is memory efficient as compared to other IDEs. Various themes are available in eclipse and we can customize it according to our needs very easily. The Windows Toolkit allows us to build desktop … Incentivized Helpful? Sudha Govindaraju C# Programmer Chose Eclipse As I already said, Eclipse might not have all the features supported by IntelliJ. However, the variety of plugins available in Eclipse make it much flexible to work with. Another main reason to go for this product was because of price (free). Since I worked for a startup, the … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Professional Chose Eclipse Eclipse was used for 3-5 years until IntelliJ became the more preferred IDE because IntelliJ has better code formatting, presentation, and navigation between different types of files. IntelliJ has a shorter learning curve and setup is easier especially for less experienced … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose Eclipse Eclipse and NetBeans are open-sourced and does not require a license to use the software. However, Eclipse has a wide selection of plugins to choose from to integrate any tools within the workspace, making development more accessible, and reducing the developer effort. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Employee Chose Eclipse Eclipse used to be the defacto standard for code development. But in recent years, as it has started focusing on its other products, like Orion and Che, it's core IDE (with focus on the 'I'), has seen a slowdown in its prominence. It cannot be compared to just the massive … Incentivized Helpful? Gabriel Samaroo Senior Software Engineer Chose Eclipse Eclipse is the best IDE on the market for Java development. It has great error and warning handling, and many integrations with useful tools - debugger, sonarqube (static code analysis), Maven / Gradle / Ant, Tomcat / Wildfly / JBoss (web servers). The best part of eclipse is … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Team Lead Chose Eclipse I used IDEA prior to using Eclipse. I loved how easy I can debug in both, but the debugging feature in IDEA is just way more polished then Eclipse. Other than that, Eclipse was easy to setup and start with. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Employee Chose Eclipse For no license, Eclipse is a very good start. IntelliJ has much greater support and tools for many things like connecting to all kinds of databases and SaaS platform such as Salesforce. Code refactoring is also very cool on IntelliJ compared to Eclipse. For Python and Django … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose Eclipse Eclipse looks better (though this is a matter of taste). All this fuss about SWT and native controls was worth it. Eclipse looks like a solid well thought-out application with pretty fonts and icons, while IDEA at first glance looks like a stunt toy with lame hack icons and … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Consultant Chose Eclipse We compared Eclipse primarily with IntelliJ, and the thing we liked about Eclipse was the support for plugins which makes it really customizable. The other features that we liked were the multitasking, filtering and debugging which are very carefully designed by keeping in mind … Incentivized Helpful? Ronald Melendez Consultor Senior Front-End Javascript Chose Eclipse They are very similar but eclipse has greater availability of plugins that allow you to achieve much more satisfactory results, in the products that are developed, the basic configurations are a bit more difficult than in NetBeans but they are much more specific and much more … Incentivized Helpful? yixiang Shan IT Strategic Technical Advisor Chose Eclipse Eclipse is better than NetBeans from many perspectives. IntelliJ is even better than Eclipse, but it is not for free Incentivized Helpful? Jose Miguel Siu Navarro Gerente de Desarrollo - Sector Publico Chose Eclipse The community around Eclipse keeps the product updated and (mostly) clean of errors. There is no commercial owner of Eclipse, so innovation is top priority for the project which leads to be more open, customizable and friendly to the users. IntelliJ is a good competitor, but … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose Eclipse Main reason to use Eclipse is that it is open source product and it is having all the features that the developer needs. So it is not necessary to bear additional costs for IDEs. Incentivized Helpful?	IntelliJ IDEA Dylan Cauwels DevOps Engineer Chose IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ is much more polished and is consistently updated with quality features. Yes, it has its flaws, but using Eclipse is the IDE equivalent of Windows Vista. I would much rather spend the extra time learning how to use all the intricate features than not have the features … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose IntelliJ IDEA Before IntelliJ IDEA developers were using NetBeans or Eclipse for the development. There are many reasons to change from that application to IntelliJ. Firstly, both Eclipse and NetBeans are free and they are not providing support as IntelliJ supports for its users. Eclipse and … Helpful? Zhann Goloborodko Senior Programmer/Analyst Chose IntelliJ IDEA Eclipse is an amazing all-purpose IDE. However, when it comes to developing Java applications, IntelliJ is far better suited. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose IntelliJ IDEA Since we are primarily a Scala shop, I only evaluated other tools based on their support for Scala. As I hinted at before, Vim and Sublime Text 3 have practically no support for Scala as all the Scala plugins that worked were never finished and abandoned and only work for Scala … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Professional Chose IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ is a full featured IDES and has the most advanced set of features for developing web and desktop applications. It supports integration of the Spring framework which is necessary for web development. It supports web app scripting languages and web development … Incentivized Helpful? SN Sumanthkumar Nagamalli Technical consultant Chose IntelliJ IDEA I have used Eclipse also in the past. But it is slow compared to IntelliJ, it does not offer as many features as IntelliJ offers, and the integrations with third-party tools is not great. But they are open-source and they don't charge anything whereas IntelliJ charges $500 per … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose IntelliJ IDEA Much more functionality and freedom than in Eclipse, but it cost you money while the second is free. Incentivized Helpful? Dinesh Pabbi Software Engineer Chose IntelliJ IDEA Against competition I can say about IntelliJ that: 1. It is definitely faster and efficient than other IDEs. Comparing with Eclipse it emerges as a clear winner in terms or raw performance. 2. More feature Rich with great support for modern technologies. It has great support for … Incentivized Helpful? Tharsanan Kurukulasingam Software Engineer Chose IntelliJ IDEA UI--IntelliJ IDEA is the winner. IntelliSense--Again, IntelliJ IDEA is the winner. Performance and CPU usage - IntelliJ IDEA has a lot of room to improve on this. Eclipse handle the large projects more effectively than IntelliJ IDEA. Incentivized Helpful? David Tanner Sr Software Engineer Chose IntelliJ IDEA Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS) requires a lot of textual configuration, where IntelliJ IDEA provides a graphical interface with configuration options displayed. This matters a lot to me as I don't want to hunt around the internet to remember how to set different parameters … Incentivized Helpful? Nitin Gupta Salesforce/Apttus Developer Chose IntelliJ IDEA Previously we were using Eclipse but due to the ease of understanding and easy to navigate user interface with drop downs, wizards they are better in IntelliJ moreover for experienced developers migrating to IntelliJ as compared to Eclipse. It has an easy to understand UI and … Incentivized Helpful? Tung Vu Senior Software Engineer Chose IntelliJ IDEA Eclipse is just so old, like a dinosaur, compared to IntelliJ. There are still formats that Eclipse supports better, especially old and/or propriety ones. Still, most of the modern software development needs can be done on IntelliJ, & in a much better way, some of them are not … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose IntelliJ IDEA It is much more friendly to use and has more features in terms of leading to more efficient and productive software engineers. I prefer the interface as well as the code Completion/code refactoring and error suggestions Helpful? LS Lakshita Salian Manager Chose IntelliJ IDEA Intellij is faster and smoother. SO it saves development time Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Analyst Chose IntelliJ IDEA Compared to the other alternatives, IntelliJ is more complete, modern and robust. The other alternatives are dated and do not have features that exist by default in IntelliJ. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ IDEA is one of the products of JetBrains and it beats every IDE in the market in terms of performance, user experience, and productivity. Incentivized Helpful? Balázs Kiss Software Developer Chose IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ surpassed every single competitor. The only viable alternative I still use is VisualStudio Code build in a browser for demo purposes... other than that, IDEA does everything better, faster, and in a more comfy way. This is the best IDE out there. This is just as good … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Administrator Chose IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ IDEA includes FTP deployment which is ideal for legacy web applications and simple projects that don't use CI/CD. The outline view which lists methods within a class (ColdFusion component) is the easiest to use out of any other IDE and makes navigating large files a … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Employee Chose IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ is very much focused on user-friendliness which I'm very fond of. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Manager Chose IntelliJ IDEA I think IntelliJ has more features and is more friendly for plugin or add-on developments. IntelliJ also suites better for large companies. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Professional Chose IntelliJ IDEA Out of all three, IntellIj is the best. The other two are light weight but don't have the plugins or code quality that Intellij provides. Incentivized Helpful? Johan Sarmiento Desarrollador Java Jr/BPM Jr Chose IntelliJ IDEA It is shared because you can manage and develop Java Maven projects in the same application, it can also be integrated with git and you can create connections based on data. But the choice to use IntelliJ is because its interface is more understandable and the database … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Employee Chose IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ IDEA is the best we have found so far for development and querying CRM and databases. We buy licenses for several users to speed up our development and configuration processes. It really accelerates our development and productivity. It is stable and fast and easier to … Incentivized Helpful?
Top Pros	Pro Open source Pro User interface Pro Easy to use	Pro Code completion Pro Version control Pro Easy to use
Top Cons	Minus Learning curve Minus 3rd party Minus System resources	Minus Learning curve Minus Large projects Minus Community edition

TrustRadius Insights
	Eclipse	IntelliJ IDEA
Highlights	Research Team Insight Published February 5, 2024 Users of both Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA have often employed these IDEs for Java development. Eclipse has been acceptable for general Java development use cases, according to reviewers, while IntelliJ IDEA is praised for its smart assistance and code analysis features. Both have been utilised for creating web applications, although IntelliJ IDEA users mention its superior support for modern frameworks and technologies. When it comes to plugin management, users have varying perspectives. Eclipse users have appreciated its vast array of plugins and the flexibility it provides. However, some have reported issues with plugin conflicts. IntelliJ IDEA users, however, praise the efficiency and seamless integration of its plugins. Finally, the degree of customization of the working environment has been another primary use case for these products. In this regard, Eclipse has stood out for its high customizability. Users are able to tailor the IDE according to their needs, although some have found this to be a bit complex. On the contrary, IntelliJ IDEA users have reported a more streamlined and intuitive interface that still allows for customization, promoting ease of use.

Best Alternatives
	Eclipse	IntelliJ IDEA
Small Businesses	Visual Studio Score 9.0 out of 10	PyCharm Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Visual Studio Score 9.0 out of 10	PyCharm Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises	Visual Studio Score 9.0 out of 10	PyCharm Score 9.0 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Eclipse	IntelliJ IDEA
Likelihood to Recommend	9.0 (73 ratings)	8.4 (55 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	9.0 (1 ratings)	5.0 (1 ratings)
Usability	9.0 (2 ratings)	9.1 (4 ratings)
Support Rating	6.8 (19 ratings)	8.9 (15 ratings)
Implementation Rating	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (1 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Eclipse	IntelliJ IDEA
Likelihood to Recommend	Open Source I think that if someone asked me for an IDE for Java programming, I would definitely recommend Eclipse as is one of the most complete solutions for this language out there. If the main programming language of that person is not Java, I don't think Eclipse would suit his needs[.] Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	JetBrains For a modern software project, where you want to store everything as code, from the backend to the frontend, to the DB patch scripts, to the documents, API specs, diagrams, infrastructure-as-code, etc. IntelliJ is basically your one-stop. In the same IDE, you can write code, write a spec, draw diagrams, make changes to patch scripts, infrastructure definition. Incentivized Tung Vu Senior Software Engineer Read full review
Pros	Open Source Eclipse organizes imports well and does a good job presenting different programming languages. Eclipse auto formats source code allowing customization and increased readability. Eclipse reports errors automatically to users rather than logging it to the console. Eclipse has coding shortcuts and auto-correction features allowing faster software development. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	JetBrains Unit testing: Fully integrated into IntelliJ IDEA. Your unit tests will run smoothly and efficiently, with excellent debugging tools for when things get tricky. Spring integration: Our Spring project using Maven works flawlessly in IntelliJ IDEA. I know firsthand that Apache is also easily and readily supported too. The integration is seamless and very easy to set up using IntelliJ IDEA's set up wizard when importing new projects. Customization: IntelliJ IDEA comes out of the box with a bunch of handy shortcuts, as well as text prediction, syntax error detection, and other tools to help keep your code clean. But even better is that it allows for total customization of shortcuts you can easily create to suit your needs. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Cons	Open Source While the DB integration is broad (many connectors) it isn't particularly deep. So if you need to do serious DB work on (for example) SQL Server, it is sometimes necessary to go directly to the SQL Server Studio. But for general access and manipulation, it is ok. The syntax formatting is sometimes painful to set up and doesn't always support things well. For example, it doesn't effectively support SCSS. Using it for remote debugging in a VM works pretty well, but it is difficult to set up and there is no documentation I could find to really explain how to do it. When remote debugging, the editor does not necessarily integrate the remote context. So, for example, things like Pylint don't always find the libraries in the VM and display spurious errors. The debugging console is not the default, and my choice is never remembered, so every time I restart my program, it's a dialog and several clicks to get it back. The debugging console has the same contextual problems with remote debugging that the editor does. Incentivized Larry Reed Senior Software Engineer Read full review	JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA wins as long as the language is Java. Outside that , e.g., in other languages, it is not so advanced. It is licensed, with a steep licensing cost. All features are not included in the free edition. It is not as light as Eclipse, so in a weak system, it can be a pain. Incentivized Dhruba Jyoti Nag Associate Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	Open Source I love this product, what makes it one of the best tool out in the market is its ability to function with a wide range of languages. The online community support is superb, so you are never stuck on an issue. The customization is endless, you can keep adding plugins or jars for more functionalities as per your requirements. It's Free !!! Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	JetBrains VS Code is maturing and has a Scala plugin now. The overall experience with VS Code - for web development at least - is very snappy/fast. IntelliJ feels a bit sluggish in comparison. If that Scala plugin for VS Code is deemed mature enough - we may not bother renewing and resort to the Community Edition if we need it. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Usability	Open Source It has everything that the developer needs to do the job. Few things that I have used in my day-to-day development 1. Console output. 2. Software flash functionality supporting multiple JTAG vendors like J-LINK. 3. Debugging capabilities like having a breakpoint, looking at the assembly, looking at the memory etc. this also applies to Embedded boards. 4. Plug-in like CMake, Doxygen and PlantUML are available. Incentivized Bhavin Kapadia R&D Sr. Staff Engineer Read full review	JetBrains The user interface for IntelliJ Idea is phenomenal. It's got the usual JetBrains interface but it works well to support all Java processes. All in all, it is a solid product and to be expected from JetBrains who creates this integrated development environment software. It allows me to test in the IDE and run other manual workflows automatically such as install packages. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Support Rating	Open Source I gave this rating because Eclipse is an open-source free IDE therefore no support system is available as far as I know. I have to go through other sources to solve my problem which is very tough and annoying. So if you are using Eclipse then you are on your own, as a student, it is not a big issue for me but for developers it is a need. Rajshekhar Sahu Student Read full review	JetBrains Customer support is really good in the case of IntelliJ. If you are paying for this product then, the company makes sure that you will get all the services adequately. Regular update patches are provided to improve the IDE. An online bug report makes it easier for the developers to find the solution as fast as possible. The large online community also helps to find the various solutions to the issues. Incentivized KV Kunal Verma Software Engineer Intern Read full review
Implementation Rating	Open Source No answers on this topic	JetBrains This installs just like any other application - its pretty straight forward. Perhaps licensing could be more challenging - but if you use the cloud licensing they offer its as simple as having engineers login to the application and it just works. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Open Source The installation, adaptability, and ease of usage for Eclipse are pretty high and simple compared to some of the other products. Also, the fact that it is almost a plug and play once the connections are established and once a new user gets the hang of the system comes pretty handy. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	JetBrains Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS) requires a lot of textual configuration, where IntelliJ IDEA provides a graphical interface with configuration options displayed. This matters a lot to me as I don't want to hunt around the internet to remember how to set different parameters that I don't use very often. This may be the biggest reason I don't use VS. Eclipse was great for when I was in college, but the power offered by IDEA is so much better that I haven't actually looked back since. Incentivized David Tanner Sr Software Engineer Read full review
Return on Investment	Open Source This development environment offers the possibility of improving the productivity time of work teams by supporting the integration of large architectures. It drives constant change and evolution in work teams thanks to its constant versioning. It works well enough to develop continuous server client integrations, based on solid or any other programming principle. Incentivized Richard Molina Java Software Developer Read full review	JetBrains IntelliJ wasn't provided as complimentary, but the pricing was reasonable. We're healthcare organization of which our applications used to be mission critical and affect to patient safety, we were willing to pay the price. With the pricing, business support was good and well conducted during the project. Overall it was cost-effective as it saved our developers' time in general. (We don't have quantitative measure but we got feedback from them) Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
ScreenShots		IntelliJ IDEA Screenshots