GitHub vs. IntelliJ IDEA

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
GitHub
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
GitHub is a platform that hosts public and private code and provides software development and collaboration tools. Features include version control, issue tracking, code review, team management, syntax highlighting, etc. Personal plans ($0-50), Organizational plans ($0-200), and Enterprise plans are available.
$4
per month per user
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
GitHubIntelliJ IDEA
Editions & Modules
Team
$40
per year per user
Enterprise
$210
per year 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
GitHubIntelliJ IDEA
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsAll Products Pack (For Individual Use) – $299 /1st year, $ 239 /2nd year and $ 179 /3d year onwards All Products Pack (For Organizations) – $979 / year
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GitHubIntelliJ IDEA
Considered Both Products
GitHub
Chose GitHub
Along with Github, I've used Bitbucket and Gitlab. Bitbucket integrates with FishEye, which allows you to institute Code Reviews and create a viable merge process. Gitlab offers similar built in tools. With Github, I'm not aware of any similar features, but this is likely due …
Chose GitHub
Gitlab is the main competitor and they also have CI / CD capabilities, and also issue tracking, wiki. Gitlab supports static website hosting but does not offer dynamic Jekyll RoR server-side processing. The main advantage of Gitlab is that it offers private repositories for …
Chose GitHub
At the time to evaluation - Bitbucket was very tightly integrated into Atlassian’s suite of tools. For an organization that is starting out and looking to spend limited funds effectively - the cost/benefit of using that suite of tools usually doesn’t make sense. Granted things …
Chose GitHub
I have used TortoiseSVN before. With SVN we don't have local source control if not connected to the repository. Git is decentralized and helps us in working remotely and committing to a repository when not local.This also adds the complexity of which commands work locally and …
IntelliJ IDEA
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 …
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 …
Chose IntelliJ IDEA
IDEA is much more intuitive, user-friendly and feature-rich than any of the other IDEs that I have encountered so far. It's not just the Ultimate - the Community Edition has the same UX (just missing a few features), and although the community may be smaller, JetBrains has an …
Features
GitHubIntelliJ IDEA
Version Control Software Features
Comparison of Version Control Software Features features of Product A and Product B
GitHub
9.1
10 Ratings
6% above category average
IntelliJ IDEA
-
Ratings
Branching and Merging9.610 Ratings00 Ratings
Version History9.510 Ratings00 Ratings
Version Control Collaboration Tools9.59 Ratings00 Ratings
Pull Requests9.710 Ratings00 Ratings
Code Review Tools8.69 Ratings00 Ratings
Project Access Control8.810 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated Testing Integration8.510 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue Tracking Integration8.510 Ratings00 Ratings
Branch Protection9.69 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GitHubIntelliJ IDEA
Small Businesses
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Perforce P4
Perforce P4
Score 6.8 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GitHubIntelliJ IDEA
Likelihood to Recommend
9.5
(131 ratings)
9.7
(58 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.4
(10 ratings)
9.2
(8 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(26 ratings)
8.9
(15 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
GitHubIntelliJ IDEA
Likelihood to Recommend
GitHub
GitHub is an easy to go tool when it comes to Version Controlling, CI/CD workflows, Integration with third party softwares. It's effective for any level of CI/CD implementation you would like to. Also the the cost of product is also very competitive and affordable. As of now GitHub lacks capabilities when it comes to detailed project management in comparison to tools like Jira, but overall its value for money.
Read full review
JetBrains
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.
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Pros
GitHub
  • Version control: GitHub provides a powerful and flexible Git-based version control system that allows teams to track changes to their code over time, collaborate on code with others, and maintain a history of their work.
  • Code review: GitHub's pull request system enables teams to review code changes, discuss suggestions and merge changes in a central location. This makes it easier to catch bugs and ensure that code quality remains high.
  • Collaboration: GitHub provides a variety of collaboration tools to help teams work together effectively, including issue tracking, project management, and wikis.
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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.
Read full review
Cons
GitHub
  • Not an easy tool for beginners. Prior command-line experience is expected to get started with GitHub efficiently.
  • Unlike other source control platforms GitHub is a little confusing. With no proper GUI tool its hard to understand the source code version/history.
  • Working with larger files can be tricky. For file sizes above 100MB, GitHub expects the developer to use different commands (lfs).
  • While using the web version of GitHub, it has some restrictions on the number of files that can be uploaded at once. Recommended action is to use the command-line utility to add and push files into the repository.
Read full review
JetBrains
  • Finding if a feature exists or not in IntelliJ IDEA can be challenging.
  • For example, if we know how to format a particular file, the command is Ctrl+Alt+Shift+L, but if we don't, then finding it is difficult.
  • Setting up a project interpreter and directory structure might not be intuitive at first.
  • Git integration can be improved. For example, it isn't easy to rebase using UI in IntelliJ IDEA.
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Likelihood to Renew
GitHub
GitHub's ease of use and continued investment into the Developer Experience have made it the de facto tool for our engineers to manage software changes. With new features that continue to come out, we have been able to consolidate several other SaaS solutions and reduce the number of tools required for each engineer to perform their job responsibilities.
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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.
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Usability
GitHub
GitHub is a clean and modern interface. The underlying integrations make it smooth to couple tasks, projects, pull requests and other business functions together. The insights and reporting is really strong and is getting better with every release. GitHub's PR tooling is strong for being web based, i do believe a better code editor would rival having to pull merge conflicts into local IDE.
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JetBrains
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.
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Support Rating
GitHub
There are a ton of resources and tutorials for GitHub online. The sheer number of people who use GitHub ensures that someone has the exact answer you are looking for. The docs on GitHub itself are very thorough as well. You will often find an official doc along with the hundreds of independent tutorials that answers your question, which is unusual for most online services.
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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.
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Implementation Rating
GitHub
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.
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Alternatives Considered
GitHub
While I don't have very much experience with these 2 solutions, they're two of the most popular alternatives to GitHub. Bitbucket is from Atlassian, which may make sense for a team that is already using other Atlassian tools like Jira, Confluence, and Trello, as their integration will likely be much tighter. Gitlab on the other hand has a reputation as a very capable GitHub replacement with some features that are not available on GitHub like firewall tools.
Read full review
JetBrains
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.
Read full review
Return on Investment
GitHub
  • Team collaboration significantly improved as everything is clearly logged and maintained.
  • Maintaining a good overview of items will be delivered wrt the roadmap for example.
  • Knowledge management and tracking. Over time a lot of tickets, issues and comments are logged. GitHub is a great asset to go back and review why x was y.
Read full review
JetBrains
  • Easier to find bugs and debugs, thus reducing man hours and generating immediate dollar impact.
  • Coding time is lessened, which in turn again reduces man hours and generates immediate dollar impact.
  • Refactoring code is more innovative and easy here, resulting in more maintainable code.
Read full review
ScreenShots

IntelliJ IDEA Screenshots

Screenshot of IntelliJ IDEA interface overview: the Project tool window (left) outlines the code structure and the Editor (right) is used to read, write, and explore the source code.Screenshot of IntelliJ IDEA analyzing the context. It then suggests the most applicable and relevant code.Screenshot of the Search Everywhere window, where users can search for files, actions, classes, symbols, settings, UI elements, and anything in Git, all from a single entry point.Screenshot of inspections to help find probable bugs and dead code, detect performance issues, and improve the overall code structure by providing quick-fixes for any code that contains potential concerns.Screenshot of IntelliJ IDEA's support for frameworks with dedicated assistance for Jakarta EE, JPA, Reactor, Spring and Spring Boot, and other popular frameworks.Screenshot of the AI Assistant that provides features for software development. It can explain code, answer questions about code fragments, provide code suggestions, generate documentation, and commit messages.