TrustRadius Insights for Eclipse are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Recommendations
Users commonly recommend using Eclipse for Java programming and Android development. They believe it is a versatile and powerful IDE that is user-friendly and helpful for any developer. Users also suggest trying out Eclipse to see if it works for you. They recommend becoming familiar with plugins in Eclipse and using it as a de-facto IDE for software development in Java and other top technologies. Additionally, they recommend considering other IDEs for languages other than Java. Users think Eclipse is simple and easy to use, but suggest trying other solutions that may be lighter. They mention that giving Eclipse more memory space can improve its loading time and highlight that it has more plugins than other IDEs. Comparison-wise, users think Eclipse is better than Netbeans and mention that it is slowly improving. Overall, users highly recommend Eclipse for developers and believe you will love it.
We use Eclipse as the main development environment for building software. In my personal case, I use it to develop web applications with Magnolia CMS product. Eclipse has different plugins you can find on its marketplace that allows you to easily integrate web bases solutions. It also supports many different languages and file types.
Pros
Localhost server
Languages support
Code revision
Code suggestions
Cons
Performance
Optimization
Some bugs you find from time to time
Likelihood to Recommend
In my opinion, Eclipse is a well-suited integrated development environment that doesn't lack any particular functionality thanks to its marketplace and the community behind it. You can build any type of software, from web applications to desktop programs, with any tool you choose and Eclipse very likely will be able to handle it. The only negative point of Eclipse is that its performance is not optimal and consumes a lot of RAM from your PC.
Alternatives
I choose Eclipse above other similar integrated development environments because Eclipse, apart from being free, has a wide community behind it that constantly adds and upgrades plugins and extensions that allow you to do and build basically anything using Eclipse. It also has a user-friendly interface and is easy to use and learn, so you can make use of the options Eclipse offers from the beginning.
Our platform unlocks the most power from it when users use the full IDE experience, which is powered by Eclipse. Many years ago we had our own UI but developers asked for basics that they expect any IDE to handle - file management, window management, consistent compile-edit lifecycle, etc. Eventually, we realized the best way to get this was simply by being an Eclipse-based product.
Pros
Integration system
Best-of-breed Java development
Flexible interface customizable, yet opinionated
Cons
MacOS support is good-then-bad-then-good
Dark mode is almost there, but not perfect
Lighten up as much as possible its memory usage
Likelihood to Recommend
If the developer is working on a large codebase, in Java in particular, imho there is no substitute for Eclipse, period. If using Maven, the experience will be about 90% there, but frankly Eclipse is the defacto standard, imho, for solid enterprise development. Doesn't look as swanky as VS Code, but that's really just an editor that invokes external tools, let's face it.
Alternatives
Microsoft Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ IDEA
IntelliJ is a good IDE as well. Any motivated user can't go wrong focusing on one and then deeply learning it, and it will pay off in productivity. Note of course that one is free the other is not! I find Eclipse is stronger at managing very large projects.
We currently use Eclipse IDE for some departments that like to use this IDE for software development. Our developers use it to quickly write code and deploy as it is easy to use and onboard new devs on it. It is also written to write unit testing for some of our applications. We also use Eclipse to deploy and test the applications using third-party tools which can be directly integrated into eclipse like TestNG.
Pros
Free of cost
Easy to use and onboard with simple UI
Ton of Debugging options/features
Code completion is really solid
Cons
Sometimes it feels Eclipse is clunky and it takes a lot of processing power
It is great for some languages, but not all. It was hard to code in Java for example
Not too many integrations with other testing apps/3rd party apps
Likelihood to Recommend
Eclipse is great for small teams/apps with a tight budget. It does not make sense for larger organizations with heavy integrations with other apps. In that case, a Visual Studio solution would make sense. Also, Eclipse doesn't tie you down to a certain OS environment so you can work in Linux or windows. Also, this is a great application just to learn programming quickly and easily for new devs or even writing small programs to automate tasks.
Alternatives
Visual Studio IDE
Visual Studio is a better solution for larger applications and organizations. Eclipse is free and good for small companies/applications. VS also integrated well with the Microsoft environment. However, Eclipse is not tied to any environment and can be used with multiple OS systems. It's a cost-benefit situation here. VS does provide a lot of integrations with Azure, etc, and also has good support for it.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Engineering (Hospitality company, 51-200 employees)
It's one of the IDEs that many developers use daily. Most Java engineers use it to write and debug code. It's used across the entire engineering team.
Pros
Lots of debugging features
Auto-completion saved a lot of time for developers
Cons
Extensibility is not as good as IntelliJ
It uses more resources than some other IDEs. It becomes pretty slow when the project is big.
Likelihood to Recommend
It's suitable for almost all Java development work. Despite areas of improvement, it's still one of the best IDEs out there.
Alternatives
IntelliJ IDEA
They are both great IDEs and we use both. IntelliJ may have a larger community so there are more plugins available, which means it could be a better choice for some specific types of projects.
Currently, Eclipse is being used by the technical team (developers) and the business intelligence team, for both software development and big data report generation. Because it's an SAP consultancy firm, sometimes it needs to be used alongside with SAP Netweaver (SAP GUI) for additional features.
Pros
ABAP development.
Java development.
Cons
It's a heavy tool and usually crashes.
The UI could be more modern.
Likelihood to Recommend
Eclipse is a great tool to use alongside with SAP GUI. It makes the ABAP and CDS development faster.
Alternatives
NetBeans, IntelliJ WebStorm and Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Eclipse could be replaced by Netbeans or WebStorm, but these last two don't have an ABAP development tools plugin (not that I know of at least).
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Engineering (Computer Software company, 201-500 employees)
Eclipse is used by various people but is not generally used by the organization. I was a user before I started at SurveyMonkey and continued to use it up until early in 2019. The company has generally not encouraged any particular IDE until this year. Most folks tended to use SublimeText, with a fair number using PyCharm, and only a few of us on Eclipse. Those of us using Eclipse like it's fully integrated debugging environment for Python (which also attracted users to PyCharm, which is essentially Eclipse with paid-for enhancements). I particularly liked being able to use it to access SQL Server in the same environment as Python and Javascript.
Pros
It is very good at managing many files under edit. I like the ability to manage multiple projects and multiple files. It supports a wide variety of file formats with type-specific syntax formatting.
I like the integrated debugging facility. In particular, we used a remote file system debugger with Python in external VMs to great effect.
I like the ability to access multiple types of databases in the integrated development environment. It provides connectors for a wide variety of databases and supports most basic DB access methods.
GIT integration is very effective. You can easily manage repositories and connect them to projects, and the project integration into GIT is virtually seamless.
Cons
While the DB integration is broad (many connectors) it isn't particularly deep. So if you need to do serious DB work on (for example) SQL Server, it is sometimes necessary to go directly to the SQL Server Studio. But for general access and manipulation, it is ok.
The syntax formatting is sometimes painful to set up and doesn't always support things well. For example, it doesn't effectively support SCSS.
Using it for remote debugging in a VM works pretty well, but it is difficult to set up and there is no documentation I could find to really explain how to do it. When remote debugging, the editor does not necessarily integrate the remote context. So, for example, things like Pylint don't always find the libraries in the VM and display spurious errors.
The debugging console is not the default, and my choice is never remembered, so every time I restart my program, it's a dialog and several clicks to get it back. The debugging console has the same contextual problems with remote debugging that the editor does.
Likelihood to Recommend
For immediate local development, it's great. You can run tests and do debugging directly. For remote environments (typical if you develop in a VM or container environment) the setup is painful and pretty much undocumented.
Alternatives
I've used Microsoft Visual Studio, Eclipse, and VSCode. Visual Studio was very good but highly oriented towards a rather limited set of uses. I chose to use Eclipse for two primary reasons:
First, it was more flexible, Open Source, and supported a much wider variety of languages and tools. Second, I wanted an environment that was independent of any of the ones companies I worked for would standardize on because I did a fair amount of development for personal reasons and I didn't want to be switching back and forth all the time.
This past year, I switched to VSCode because my company standardized on it and maintaining Eclipse separately became too much trouble. For those areas in which most of my development occurred, VSCode worked pretty well.
Eclipse has been my favorite IDE to use for Java development. Eclipse has great shortcuts that improve the speed at which you code, and have a lot of great built-in features, such as the debugger and a marketplace to add plugins for various frameworks like Spring and Maven. Like any good IDE, you can have your own custom settings and preferences to tailor things to your specific preferences.
Pros
Extremely easy to install and use
It's free to use (as opposed to competitors like intelliJ)
Great marketplace for add-ons like Themes and Spring / Maven plugins
Cons
Great IDE for Java development. Plugins available for other languages (ie: Python), but not as good compared to other IDEs (ie: pyCharm)
Uses a lot of system resources / CPU
There are so many features built-in and available for use, it can sometimes take a long time to learn them all.
Likelihood to Recommend
I would highly recommend Eclipse as the IDE of choice for Java developers. It's great for both small and large teams, but particular good for large teams because it is free to use. If you are developing in other languages (such as Python), I would recommend using other IDEs (such as VS Code, Atom / Sublime, intelliJ, pyCharm, etc.)
Alternatives
PyCharm, IntelliJ IDEA, Sublime Text, Atom and Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Eclipse is the best IDE on the market for Java development. It has great error and warning handling, and many integrations with useful tools - debugger, sonarqube (static code analysis), Maven / Gradle / Ant, Tomcat / Wildfly / JBoss (web servers). The best part of eclipse is it is free to use, so anyone can download it at any time.
We use Eclipse for Java development which includes building and deploying web services, as well as Java Android development, although for the latter we primarily use Android Studio now. However, we have legacy Android applications which still require the use of Android Studio as they were never upgraded to Android Studio and Gradle. So, for Maven projects we still do Android development with Eclipse. Primarily, however, we use Eclipse for building web apps and cloud services.
Pros
Eclipse is great for its Docker integration. We have had a breeze deploying using Docker with Eclipse.
I love Eclipse's local history feature. Even with Git Flow integration, which we also use, it's nice to be able to quickly diff between current and older versions of a file.
Eclipse has a very powerful search feature for finding and replacing code.
Eclipse is also great at refactoring. I love its auto-import and code generation features.
Cons
Eclipse has so many windows that it took me years before I wasn't overwhelmed by them. When I first started using Eclipse in 2006 I couldn't stand it.
The learning curve is very steep. There are a hundred little tricks you have to learn.
Sometimes Eclipse can get into a bad state and you have to clear the caches and restart or go through elaborate build-clean-build processes to fix it.
Eclipse can run very slowly.
Eclipse is notoriously bloated with unnecessary features that most of us will never use.
Likelihood to Recommend
Eclipse is great for Java development. It's not my first choice for Android development since Android Studio is so much better now. However, having done Android development in Eclipse for years, it's not that bad for that either. Eclipse is also not my first choice for web development of any kind, despite plugins that go a long way to supporting web languages. There are simply better IDEs out there if you want to write Ruby, Python, Perl, or PHP code. There are also better IDEs and text editors for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and many of the new web technologies like CoffeeScript and Less. I pretty much only use Eclipse for Java development and for that it's a must.
Alternatives
Atom, NetBeans, Sublime Text, IntelliJ IDEA and IntelliJ WebStorm
NetBeans is the closest competitor I've found to Eclipse for Java development. IntelliJ IDEA is good as well but it isn't free. NetBeans is a free competitor that has split the Java community, and a lot of it comes down to preference, like the famous vim vs. emacs wars. I would say that Eclipse is harder to use but once you learn it, there's no reason to start the learning curve all over again with NetBeans, even though the learning curve is not that steep. In my case, since I already knew Eclipse inside and out from my time at Amazon.com, I was happy to continue using it. If I were to start over again, I might start with NetBeans because the learning curve is so much more moderate. However, I do think Eclipse has a rich plugin ecosystem and robust feature set that makes it more appropriate than NetBeans for highly complex Java applications. I like Eclipse's concept of workspaces and its ability to switch between a lot of different projects, each with their own configurations. Eclipse is good at environment management.
Eclipse is a very useful tool for small projects that needs a very useful tool for JAVA programmers in general. We use it daily I really like having a text editor with a syntax marker whose compilation is in real time. You can do many activities in a single application, such as unit tests with JUnit version control with CVS and integration with Ant, which is very useful and decreases the delivery time of the work. You can also add the add-in to provide more features. It is a lightweight platform for software components.
Pros
It has an excellent autocompiler and provides a lot of help with all its libraries.
It is very useful and decreases the time of delivery of the work. You can also add the add-in to provide more features.
It is a good IDE to program in Java and shows compilation errors during the programs. It has utility for many add-ons to generate web services.
Cons
What I dislike most about Eclipse is the consumption of system resources because it does not work for old computers.
It is developed for people who are already professionals and not beginners because the learning curve is broad and lacks support for webapps as if it were netbeans.
It needs to be more intuitive and it would be nice to add more add-ons and tutorials to help beginners.
Likelihood to Recommend
I would recommend 100% as it is a very useful tool for the IDE program that facilitates your work, decreases delivery times and is very easy to use. It has helped me reduce the delivery times of small projects, although I am used to NetBeans, this program is much less heavy, so for small projects of short duration it is a good option and a way to optimize the work. It is smart and comfortable. It has all the desirable properties to facilitate the work of a developer.
Alternatives
NetBeans
Personally, I like Eclipse more than the less heavy one, it is a development environment that allows applications to be developed from a set of modules, which can be done independently. It offers common reusable services for desktop applications, allowing developers to focus on the logic of their applications. From the applications created from these, new modules can be added. With Eclipse you must generate all the code yourself, of course you can also create graphical interfaces yourself or using a plug-in, but unlike NetBeans, the number of lines is smaller.
Since Eclipse is free and versatile to use with any kind of development environments, most developers in my organization prefer to use it as their main Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Java SE and EE projects.
Pros
Main advantage is that it does not need any propitiatory license to use its full features. So using Eclipse is cost effective for any software development company.
Eclipse is comprehensive to adapt most industrial technologies/frameworks without any hesitation.
Eclipse has frequent upgrades. So the issues in the eclipse source are being rectified.
Cons
Eclipse users may experience unexpected crashes due to various reasons.
Compared to Intellij IDEA, Eclipse is lack of user friendliness.
Eclipse may be slow in operation when it has many background processes.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are looking for an open source IDE, Eclipse is the best which fulfills all the developer needs including repository management, code corrections, debug options and deployment etc.
Alternatives
IntelliJ IDEA
Main reason to use Eclipse is that it is open source product and it is having all the features that the developer needs. So it is not necessary to bear additional costs for IDEs.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 201-500 employees)
