WebStorm is an integrated development environment (IDE) by JetBrains. Designed for JavaScript and TypeScript development, WebStorm also aims to make it easy to tackle the most challenging tasks. Whether resolving Git merge conflicts or renaming a symbol across multiple files, it takes just a few clicks.
$0
per year
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
WebStorm
Windsurf
Editions & Modules
Individual Non-Commercial
$0
per year
Individual
$6.90
per month
Bussiness
$15.90
per month per user
Individual
$69
per year
Business
$159
per year per user
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)
Groups that use a [variety] of development environments (.net, python, web), Jebrain's products and Webstorm, in particular, are a great choice for productivity. If your developers are accustom to another IDE it might be better for all to sync on the same one. I wouldn't take the cost aspect as a consideration. A productive developer is far more important.
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.
The popup file search sometimes frustrates me. It caps the number of results, and sometimes it isn't clear that it simply stopped looking. I also used to have trouble finding string occurrences that I knew were in my project, but I think they've made improvements in this area recently.
Being a AAA IDE, WebStorm can be a memory hog. If I don't kill it every few days, it can get really slow. I would love to see performance improvements.
Speaking of performance, WebStorm can take a long time to launch. I'd like to see improvements in launch times.
Great in debugging, testing, developing and maintaining softwares in a number of languages. Great support for many languages and their syntaxes. Great support of many third party extensions and plugins like GIT and html plugins. The RAM usage of WebStorm however could be really improved, it literally takes almost all of the RAM of my machine with 16GB RAM
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.
I gave this rating because I have never needed their customer support, which is the highest level of support I suppose. When a product works just fine out of the box and everything you may need is well documented, it's a paradise for the customer. But I've seen some questions asked on their portal, and I've seen thorough answers given to the questions and the willingness to support the customer with follow-ups and everything else.
I think WebStorm is way ahead of open-source editors. Please don't get me wrong, I love open-source. But the other free editors have a lot of configuration which blocks my whole coding experience. Take "Atom" for example. I used it for about 3 months, but in that time I had to update the plugins hundreds of time, and for every little thing (e.g. linter) I had to download a community plugin, and with each plugin atom would get a little slow. Take "Eclipse" for another example, which is very suited for Java, but not so suited for JavaScript. Sublime was good, but WebStorm comes with many exciting features that I did not find in sublime/notepad.
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.
