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
Windsurf
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Windsurf (formerly Codeium) is an AI dev tool that is self-hosted for security, with features including rapid code autocomplete, in-editor AI chat assistant, repo natural language search, end-to-end data encryption.
$15
per month for 500 prompt credits/month Equivalent to 2,000 GPT-4.1 prompts (4 prompts per credit)
Pricing
IntelliJ IDEA
Windsurf
Editions & Modules
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
Pro
$15
per month 500 credits/mo
Team
$30
per month per user (500 credits/user/mo)
Enterprise
$60
per month per user (up to 200 users & 1,000 credits/user/mo)
Enterprise (more than 200 uses)
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IntelliJ IDEA
Windsurf
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
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
IntelliJ stacks better against Eclipse or vs code because it provides better code suggestions, out-of-the-box SonarLint integration, and built-in support for version control with git. It also has a vast collection of plugins that can increase developer productivity, reduce …
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.
If you already have technical knowledge and understanding of coding, Windsurf could be a valuable platform to debug and rewrite code. It was helpful to me to expand coding, since I am not a traditionally programmer. I was able to enhance my base code and functionality much quicker than manually trying.
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.
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.
Windsurf is a good tool for developers with more than basic coding skills. I would recommend it as a tool to quickly mitigate coding errors and issues. I did not take a deeper dive into the integrated extensions, but the library of extensions appear to be solid. An experience developer could quickly launch this platform, scan and test coding, and resolve issues quickly. I did not test this for larger code sets.
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.
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.
Windsurf would be more comparable to GitHub Copilot or Perplexity to me. I think it's more of a pure code debugging line by line than some of the other tools listed above, however, they all have some capabilities to rewrite and test new coding. It boils down to what toolset you are most comfortable with. I typically will work with two platforms with the same issue to see how it is approached and the differences.
