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
The Welkin Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
The Welkin Suite offers an integrated development environment with 105 features (and growing). The vendor aims to help you automate the chores of development, and therefore enhance your coding velocity and increase the quality of your deliverable code.
$12.50
per month
Pricing
IntelliJ IDEA
The Welkin Suite
Editions & Modules
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
Professional
$12.50
per month billed annually
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IntelliJ IDEA
The Welkin Suite
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Yearly subscriptions:
For Individual Use – $169 /1st year, $ 135 /2nd year and $ 101 /3d year onwards
All Products Pack (For Individual Use) – $289 /1st year, $ 231 /2nd year and $ 173 /3d year onwards
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.
The Welkin Suite is a great IDE compared to the alternatives out there. If you need to code in Salesforce and you want a mostly seamless environment, then The Welkin Suite is the best option available, in my opinion. I have also been using it for Apex Tests and find that the tools are really good for measuring code coverage and highlighting those areas that are uncovered.
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.
It would be nice if IDE feature releases were timed to coincide with Salesforce releases (i.e. make Lightning Web Components available on the day they become available in Salesforce instances).
The IDE can be a bit buggy especially when you have several windows of the IDE open to different Salesforce instances at the same time on one machine.
Sometimes, when you click to retrieve your data too soon, before the program has a chance to ask you to connect to the instance, it can cause the IDE to freeze.
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.
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.
In general, when you need support there is someone there to give you an answer. I think there could be an improvement in this area, but it's hard to provide a substantial amount of support for a product that is charging roughly $15 a month. Do I feel I get more than $15 worth of support value when I need to request it? Yes.
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.
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.
