A Professional Software Development tool that comes at a Price
Updated April 03, 2021

A Professional Software Development tool that comes at a Price

Dinesh Pabbi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IntelliJ IDEA

I am an indie developer and a student so I work with web technologies a lot. I usually use IntelliJ when i have to develop a website quickly. IntelliJ allows me to quickly use the front end technologies and with its support of all the major new frameworks (Front end) and advanced code completion, version control capabilities, it is a complete professional developer suite for an indie developer and a team of developers alike.

What I like about This IDE:
1. Support for all the major new frameworks and technologies in front end (ActionScript, SASS, LESS)
2. Version control
3. HTML, CSS, and Javascript editor is just awesome.
4. This IDE is very quick, I mean I have not seen any other IDE being this fast. I have used Eclipse and that IDE is not close to this IDE in terms of performance.

What I don't like:
1. Well, as a student I had trouble buying it since its costly, but hey all good things do come at a cost, right?
2. Since it is feature rich, it has a somewhat big memory footprint so it requires a little more RAM usage.

  • It made development in javascript a breeze. Auto-completion was on point and more importantly, the auto-completion was based on DOM model and browser. This allowed me to complete the code so much faster than I ever could before. I completed the Javascript part of my university technical fest website in 4 days!
  • It has built in support for version control, so whenever you feel like you need to backtrack to a previous state or version of website you saved , you can easily do it! This has saved me several times when code broke or when i could not figure out the problem in code so I just backtracked and re-did everything again.
  • The plugin support is really great . First of all it has plethora of plugins . Since I am trying to learn Scala, I installed the Scala plugin and I was good to go. It never felt like this IDE was not made for it.
  • The console that comes with the IDE is somewhat laggy.
  • Of course , this IDE is a memory hog as I mentioned earlier, but i think for all the features it provides it is worth it.
  • There were some minor bugs (Only happened once!) which lead to disappearance of my code entirely . But when I restarted it all came back to normal.
  • Since I am an indie developer and a student too, I can say for myself that it added speed and efficiency to my development process. I was happy developing websites in it.
Against competition I can say about IntelliJ that:
1. It is definitely faster and efficient than other IDEs. Comparing with Eclipse it emerges as a clear winner in terms or raw performance.
2. More feature Rich with great support for modern technologies. It has great support for version control, LESS, SAAS, Maven to name but a few.
3. A more complete package. Its HTML, CSS, and Javascript editor are better as compared to others. That coupled with packages , features and other small customization make it an overall better package for software development.
4. Costlier. This does not need explanation. Other IDEs which I used were open source and hence free. This is costly.
5. Has a better UI.
Due to its cost, I believe it is best suited for enterprise since its subscription model is really costly at 199$ per year. I got it on a students' subscription but again, this is a very professional IDE and if you want to use it only for web, I believe it would be going over the top since for simple web development there are cheaper alternatives. But if you are a java and a web developer and can afford it, go for it!