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Atom

Atom

Overview

What is Atom?

Atom is a free and open source text editor offering a range of packages and themes.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Atom is a versatile and widely-used text and code editor that offers numerous features and benefits to its users. It is favored by …
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Pricing

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What is Atom?

Atom is a free and open source text editor offering a range of packages and themes.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Sublime Text?

Sublime Text is a highly customizable text editing solution featuring advanced API, Goto functions, and other features, from Sublime HQ in Sydney.

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Product Details

Atom Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Atom is a free and open source text editor offering a range of packages and themes.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 8.6.

The most common users of Atom are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(89)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Atom is a versatile and widely-used text and code editor that offers numerous features and benefits to its users. It is favored by developers across various organizations and industries for a range of use cases. Users appreciate Atom's clean and simple user interface, making it easy to navigate and use without any issues. With support for multiple programming languages, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, C++, and more, Atom is suitable for diverse coding projects.

One key use case of Atom is as a powerful tool for web development. It enables developers to efficiently write code for websites using languages like PHP, CSS, JS, and HTML. Its features, such as syntax highlighting and autocompletion, make coding in these languages more efficient. Additionally, Atom's integration with Git provides version control capabilities, allowing teams to collaborate on website development projects seamlessly.

Another notable use case of Atom is its popularity among data scientists and analytics professionals. With support for programming languages like Python, R, and Unix, Atom serves as an effective code editor for editing multiple codes in analytics workflows. Its customizable nature allows users to tailor the editor to their specific needs, making it a valuable tool for data analytics and machine learning projects.

Furthermore, Atom is recommended by developers as an alternative to Visual Studio Code due to its relatively basic interface and extensive selection of plugins contributed by the community. This attributes to its widespread usage within organizations as a preferred IDE text editor.

Overall, Atom's versatility, ease of use, extensive plugin ecosystem, and compatibility with various programming languages make it a go-to choice for developers seeking a customizable and efficient coding environment.

Highly Customizable: Many users have praised Atom for its high level of customization. They appreciate the ability to tailor their coding environment to their preferences, with various themes and extensions available. This feature allows them to make their code easier to read and navigate, enhancing their overall coding experience.

Code Hinting Features: Several reviewers have been impressed with Atom's code hinting capabilities. This feature helps them write code faster and integrates well with services like LINT, allowing them to clean up their code according to their team's style choices. Users find this functionality particularly useful in speeding up their coding process.

Free Software: The fact that Atom is free has been seen as a major advantage by many users. They appreciate not having to invest in expensive software while still being able to access a robust coding environment. This affordability makes it accessible to a wide range of developers.

Limited API Requests: Some users have experienced the issue of receiving an error message stating "Error: Request failed with status code 429." Several reviewers have expressed frustration with this limitation, as it hinders their ability to make API requests effectively.

Performance Issues: A number of users have reported performance issues while using Atom. They have noticed sluggishness and lag in the software, particularly when dealing with larger files or projects. This has led to delays and inefficiencies in their workflow.

Lack of Intuitive UI/UX: Several reviewers have mentioned that they find the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of Atom to be less intuitive compared to other text editors. Users have struggled with finding certain features, customizing their workspace, and navigating through the application smoothly.

Users recommend using the self-hosted version of Atom instead of the cloud version and taking advantage of Atom's package manager. They suggest that Atom is suitable for both beginners and professionals, as well as for web development, Ruby on Rails development, and front-end development. Atom is also considered a lightweight and visually appealing text editor. Users often suggest it as an alternative to Sublime Text and for languages without a dedicated IDE. They encourage exploring the wide range of packages available in the Atom community and customizing Atom to personal preferences. Atom is frequently recommended for learning to code and simple web development projects. However, users caution that it may not be suitable for large projects and advise learning the keyboard shortcuts for improved efficiency. Additionally, they recommend using Atom on a PC with higher RAM capacity and exploring Atom's plugins for added functionality.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 31)
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January 02, 2024

Joyful coding

Flavio Mauri | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Atom for coding emails. I was having a weird problem with Dreamweaver (the licensed software my team uses) for which the program would lag, despite having the same machine as other members... so I picked Atom, which I knew was freely available and I had used in a previous job.
Atom works flawlessly, it's super lightweight, and has wonderful themes that are really pleasing to the eye compared to Dreamweaver or Visual Studio Code
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My organization allows us to choose what IDE/text editor we would like to use, and Atom is a popular choice among developers. One of the biggest business problems that Atom addresses is how to efficiently collaborate with other developers while working remotely. Some of its features make it the best possible option for effective and efficient remote collaboration.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Atom is a powerful editor that is being used by development teams for coding in any given programming language. We were looking to unify the developer's experience and work on a single platform, as opposed to everyone having their own editor. Although it is not made mandatory, we had a pretty good and quick adoption of the product throughout the years. Atom is very customizable, which helps tremendously.
Laura Glover | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Atom is my favourite free, open-source editor. We have use Atom in our development projects. We have used it as a collaboration tool by integrating with Git hub - it was easy to set it up so that the team can work on the same project at the same time from different computers. The code syntax is coloured by language type - which is helpful to see your code. We use it for HTML, JS, CSS, Sass, and PHP editing.
Deepshi Sharma | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Atom is used by only the development team in my organization. Atom has a simple UI that makes users use it without any issues. It has support for GitHub and has a lot of plugins. Along with this, a user can write its own plugin. Support code formating for different languages and its minimap feature also helps sometimes. It is being used to develop clean, well-structured code for our product. It is simply perfect because of everything it provides. The next best thing about Atom is that you have git control over it which helps to make things super easy in terms of open sourcing.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Atom IDE is a very nice application having inbuilt CLI and it supports multiple extensions and programming languages. I and our coder are using Atom and VS Code mainly because these applications are easy to use and need very low system configurations.
David McCann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I am the only user of Atom at my organization, but it was the editor of choice at my previous job. It is used for quick-and-dirty text manipulation, as well as for C# and Javascript coding.
Jonah Dempcy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Atom for C++ development because I enjoy its user interface and I like how extensible it is. I first discovered Atom when a mentor of mine introduced me to the Beta. I was immediately drawn to the fact that it has support for plugins written in Node.js, which I am a big fan of. I also like its Git integration. The fact that the whole app is written in what are essentially web development technologies also appeals to me, given my history in web development. Since I do a lot of Android development, I use Android Studio. However, for the JNI layer and native code (written in C++, in my case) I prefer using Atom over Android Studio.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Atom is being used across the entire organization and most of the data scientists in my company are currently using it under local environment. Even though Atom is just an option and not required to be used, most of my colleagues including myself prefer to use it due to its interface.
Xiaotong Song | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Atom is widely used in my organization for data scientists. Even though the IDE is not required it is preferred by most of our data scientists. Compared to other IDEs such as PyCharm, the tool is allowing the users to edit multiple codes instead of only python but also R and unix.
Patrick Fong | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used to use Atom as our code editor of choice for our dynamically typed language. Atom comes with fantastic syntax highlighting and other plugins out of the box that make writing code a breeze. Whenever we have to write HTML, CSS, Javascript, or Python, we used to use Atom. Some engineers also use Atom with some extra plugins for quick text manipulation, such as when they need to format strips, strip out lots of whitespaces, or prefix an unnumbered list with numbers. We have since switched over to VSCode (more on that later), but I would say that Atom is still a good choice if you are already using it.
January 30, 2020

Used Atom about 1 year

Suleman Ahmad | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In our organization (software house), it is totally developers' choice in the engineering department to choose the IDE of their own choice. I was impressed by the shortcuts of Atom like Toggle Comment, Column Selection, Select Same Words, etc. and to install the Packages for ease of development. So that's why I migrated to it.
Samuel Hadid | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Atom [text editor] is not being used across the whole organization, though many people use it for software development. Its compatibility with many programming/scripting languages is great. It helps a lot with creating programs because it is preloaded with a coloring scheme that highlights libraries, reserved words, and even autofill some functions, which makes it even faster to code. Other users use other text editors, but most of us stick with Atom whenever possible.
Daniel Städeli | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Atom for coding in different software projects. All developers use Atom, but we also have other editors available. The GIT integration of Atom makes our workflow more manageable. The FTP plugin also helps to connect and edit files on the server directly.
Jason Smith, DPA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Atom to edit code on the Mac and Windows platform. As a technologist, I do recommend this editor to both faculty and students because it is free and open-source. It is a good text editor and code editor with lots of functionality. It is modern and seems rather stable. I think it will be around for quite a while.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I've been using Atom to code custom websites for my organization, and previously for a small web design company. While I am the sole user in my organization, I use Atom to code in PHP (for custom WordPress sites), HTML, some javascript, and even SASS for CSS. The ability to manage an entire project in one environment is key to a good workflow.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Atom as our coding platform for everything on our website. It is integrated with git so we have version control. It is a very fast and free alternative to using Adobe Dreamweaver which is the subscription we have.
Mark Nowowiejski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Atom is a free text editor that is outstanding for writing made forms of code. I currently use if for composing HTML, CSS, Javascript, and JSON for local testing prior to uploading code to an LMS or CMS.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As an open-source editor, several people within my organization are currently using the power of Atom as their code editor of choice. Because Atom is relatively basic in interface with the added benefit of countless plugins contributed by the larger community, Atom is generally the most recommended editor in my organization outside of Visual Studio Code.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My team uses it to develop and maintain our websites using HTML, JavaScript and Django, a python based framework. It is also used as a general purpose text editor. It's light weight too. It also gave us functions comparable to that of a IDE without all the memory usage. It's open source and easily customizable. We also found it to have one of the best GIT integrations among its competitors.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Atom is being used by my team as one of the primary text editors for data analytics and machine learning workflows when it comes to making modifications to code and writing analytic SQL queries. The primary business problem it addresses is a cross-platform analytics tool that all our team members can use to make changes to code. It also allows for plugin extensibility, and thereby reduces the amount of friction when sharing text and code that needs highlighting.
Steven Puringi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Since I am a semi-professional freelancer, Atom is very useful in my exploits in interactive web development. The packages that can be added onto the IDE are very useful, they save time, assist in code structure and development. packages such as HTML Preview help save time between tests as it capture whatever changes I make to the code and displays it in real time, Text Select is another that identifies text of the same name when clicked upon so I can debug my code much more efficiently if need be, Emmit is another that enable short-hand coding which also saves time in terms of tag creations. These a but o few of packages that Atom has to offer to make web development much more efficient and flexible for developers.
Dylan Cauwels | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Atom is used as a small scripting tool by mainly myself and a few others. It's a perfect tool for drumming up a rapid solution to any problem-- in our case, aws and infrastructure problems. It has enough tools and plug-ins to help you debug a script, but still remains incredibly lightweight and quick to deploy.
Matthew Deakyne | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Atom is being used by select individuals at the University of Kansas, and not by the organization as a whole. Its used primarily as a simple text editor, but can be configured to be used as a full IDE. It is highly configurable to domain-specific problems, but its core competency is text editing.
Dhruba Jyoti Nag | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Atom is mostly used by developers across my current organizations. It is a highly customizable editor with many new developer-friendly features. It can also be custom built to suit individual needs. These customizations have quickly made it a favorite with many developers using Atom. In otherways, Atom brings the best of Sublime Text and Notepad++ together.
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