GitHub Copilot is presented as an AI pair programmer, that plugs into the user's editor. It then turns natural language prompts into code, offers multi-line function suggestions, speeds up test generation, filters out common vulnerable coding patterns, and blocks suggestions matching public code.
$10
per month
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.
$19.90
per month
Pricing
GitHub Copilot
IntelliJ IDEA
Editions & Modules
CoPilot for Individuals
$10
per month
CoPilot for Business
$19
per month per user
For Individual Use (Monthly billing)
$19.90
per month
For Organizations (Monthly billing)
$71.90
per month
For Individual Use (Yearly billing)
$199
per year
For Organizations (Yearly billing)
$719
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GitHub Copilot
IntelliJ IDEA
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
All Products Pack (For Individual Use) – $299 /1st year, $ 239 /2nd year and $ 179 /3d year onwards
All Products Pack (For Organizations) – $979 / year
Copilit is fantastic at the following: 1. Solving simple, well-defined problems, such as implementing an algorithm, manipulating a data structure, or string manipulation and regex. 2. Implementing simple APIs that are mainly CRUD in nature, with moderate business logic inside them, which may involve some processing or passing the data through an algorithm. 3. Implementation of well-defined activities, such as implementing a connection to an Oracle DB using Hibernate or JDBC, or implementing boilerplate code for a backend service to listen to Kafka events. It is not that great when it comes to understanding and implementing code in a proprietary DSL. It struggles when implementing a major feature across a complex codebase. I believe developers should also adopt the trust-but-verify paradigm when expecting highly secure or regulated code from GitHub Copilot.
This is a superb tool if your project involves a lot of backend development, especially in Java/Spring Boot and Kotlin. The support for the front end is great as well, but some developers may prefer to use the GitHub copilot add-on. I especially love using the GitHub copilot add-on. It may be less appropriate if your project requires heavy use of HotSwaps for backend debugging, as sometimes the support for that can be limited.
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.
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.
I feel that GitHub Copilot's overall usability is good due to its tight integration with Visual Studio and the workspace. However, developers expect greater ease of use, as there is a learning curve to realize productivity gains with the tool fully. I think there is room for improvement in GitHub Copilot's UI integration within Visual Studio.
There is always room for improvement, but I haven't met any IDE that I liked more so far. Even if it did not fit a use case right out of the box, there is always a way to configure how it works to do just that.
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.
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.
It is useful that copilot integrates so well with vscode, which is a very common IDE. I used Tabnine for a little while but it was not that intuitive, and did not seem as helpful as GitHub copilot was. I have enjoyed GitHub copilot a lot, especially the ease of hitting the tab key and seeing quick progress in my tasks.
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 even supported on Eclipse.
