Best for web developers, OK for everyone else
December 18, 2018

Best for web developers, OK for everyone else

James Pautz II | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Brackets

Brackets is used by me in my role managing my company website's codebase as well as some other websites that I run. I also use it for development of browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome. It is a very web-focused text editor that has a good number of useful plugins to extend functionality.
  • A clean simple UI with an excellent dark theme
  • There are plenty of customization options and extensibility via plugins
  • It is pretty fast and very smart when working with front-end website files
  • The live preview mode is a nice feature when coding as part of a presentation
  • The implementation of code-completion feels natural and effortless
  • It has some readability issues with the fonts being too small on my personal laptop.
  • It isn't as powerful as some new competitors.
  • Brackets is free, so the ROI is really time-based. Brackets has saved me time in my web development over using a more simple text editor.
  • Notepad++
  • Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Brackets is kind of in the middle ground between Notepad++ and Visual Studio Code. It is a little smarter than Notepad++ (though both have a good collection of plugins) but a little slower and not quite as smart as Visual Studio Code. Brackets really favors the web developer, so it beat VS Code in some of the extensions. For example, I use an extension that compiles my Stylus code to CSS automatically. This is really slick and I don't have to think about it. The other two editors don't have similar plugins (though they could be created).
If you are just developing for the front end of the web, Brackets is a great option. It is cross-platform works well. If you rely on all the extras that an IDE gives you, Brackets probably won't satisfy you.