NetBeans vs. Oracle Java SE

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
NetBeans
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
NetBeans is a free and open source platform and integrated development environment (IDE).N/A
Oracle Java SE
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Oracle Java SE is a programming language and gives customers enterprise features that minimize the costs of deployment and maintenance of their Java-based IT environment.N/A
Pricing
NetBeansOracle Java SE
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
NetBeansOracle Java SE
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
NetBeansOracle Java SE
Considered Both Products
NetBeans
Oracle Java SE
Chose Oracle Java SE
Java being platform independent, makes it one of the most popular choices of programming languages. It's secure, fast, and is open source.
Best Alternatives
NetBeansOracle Java SE
Small Businesses
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
GraalVM
GraalVM
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
GraalVM
GraalVM
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
GraalVM
GraalVM
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
NetBeansOracle Java SE
Likelihood to Recommend
7.8
(22 ratings)
9.0
(33 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(2 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
8.5
(4 ratings)
8.0
(19 ratings)
User Testimonials
NetBeansOracle Java SE
Likelihood to Recommend
Open Source
NetBeans is extremely user friendly and easy to start developing complex applications. Adding and configuring external libraries is much simpler than in Eclipse. It is highly cost effective and most of the latest framework based libraries required are automatically downloaded to the projects. The overall tool is also light weight and consumes less memory as compared to other competitor tools.
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Oracle
Oracle Java SE is well suited to long-running applications (e.g. servers). Java Swing (UI toolkit) is now rather outdated, lacking support for modern UI features. JavaFX, the potential replacement for Swing, has now been separated out of Java core. Ideally, there would be a path to migrate a large application incrementally from Swing to JavaFX, but due to different threading models and other aspects, it is difficult. At this point, it is probably better to use an embedded web browser (e.g. JxBrowser) to provide a modern UI in HTML/Javascript and keep just the business logic in Java.
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Pros
Open Source
  • Debugging - Save time hunting down errors by stepping through the code to find the root of a problem.
  • Refactoring - Easily rename classes and variables or make other structural changes using built-in refactoring tools.
  • Service management - NetBeans integrates seamlessly with web application servers like Tomcat and GlassFish.
  • Source control - Works well with Git and other version control tools.
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Oracle
  • Plenty support built into the tool and IDE like Maven, Ant, Eclipse, IntelliJ.
  • Strong object-orientation language and clear project structure.
  • Wrapper underlines hardware and memory management so the developers can focus on business and implementation.
  • It offers a huge library and framework support from third-parties and the community.
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Cons
Open Source
  • NetBeans [should] work smoothly with systems having less RAM. Systems with less RAM face trouble with NetBeans.
  • File open history also requires improvement. Once NetBeans is restarted, all files are closed automatically and there is no shortcut to open last opened files.
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Oracle
  • Commercial Licensing in 2019. Oracle will charge commercial organizations using Java SE for upgrading to the latest bug fixes and updates. Organizations will now need to either limit their implementation of Java SE or may need to drop it altogether.
  • Slow Performance. Due to the all of the abstraction of the JVM, Java SE programs take much more resources to compile and run compared to Python.
  • Poor UI appearance on all of the major GUI libraries (Swing, SWT, etc.). Through Android Studio, it is easy to get a native look/feel for Java apps, but when it comes to desktops, the UI is far from acceptable (does not mimic the native OS's look/feel at all).
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Usability
Open Source
Netbeans enhances my coding work, shows me where I have errors and helps find variable instances. I would be lost without find/replace in projects functionality as I use projects as templates for new projects. Occasionally the code hints aggravate me, but I understand that it is actually making me a better coder, working to get the 'green light' of a clean file with no errors or clumsy code.
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Oracle
Oracle Java SE provides the new features along with timely security patches. New features like Record patterns and pattern matching for switches are very useful. With every new release of Java, it is getting better. Sequenced collections are also an interesting feature added to Java. With all these new features, backward compatibility is also maintained.
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Support Rating
Open Source
NetBeans has a very strong user community. We can find solutions here for almost all the problems we face. In addition, we can forward NetBeans Support teams the problems we cannot solve. We can get quick feedback from the support teams, but I generally try to solve my problems by following the forums.
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Oracle
Java is such a mature product at this point that there is little support from the vendor that is needed. Various sources on the internet, and especially StackOverflow, provide a wealth of knowledge and advice. Areas that may benefit from support is when dealing with complex multithreading issues and security libraries.
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Alternatives Considered
Open Source
It works very smoothly as compared to other tools . The problem of restarting and reimporting the projects is not in the netbeans IDE . The front end development features are good . Netbeans connector is one of the best thing which enables us to deeply integrate netbeans IDE with google chrome browser
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Oracle
Chose to go with Java instead of Python or C++ due to the expertise on the ground with the technology, for its ease of integration with our heterogeneous setup of production servers, and for the third party library support which we've found was able to address some challenging aspects of our business problem.
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Return on Investment
Open Source
  • By working on Netbeans I just learned one more tool and can teach others about it. One should learn every tool so that it might help someday if another editor is not available and you have to use different software for your work.
  • Compiling code became easy as it is not a feature of normal text editors. Only IDE can do this.
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Oracle
  • The different versions make it harder to work with other companies where some use newer versions while some use older versions, costing time to make them compatible.
  • Licenses are getting to be costly, forcing us to consider OpenJDK as an alternative.
  • New features take time to learn. When someone starts using them, everyone has to take time to learn.
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ScreenShots