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The reigning champion in front-end IDEs
February 08, 2019

The reigning champion in front-end IDEs

Ben McClure | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IntelliJ WebStorm

Our development team is utilizing IntelliJ WebStorm along with the other applications in the Jetbrains Toolbox. Typically, we use it when we are developing front-end libraries, such as Node.js modules, or other Javascript libraries and applications, all the way through to complete websites in some cases. We move over to PhpStorm or another tool if we need a server-side dynamic language, however.
  • The coding assistance provided by WebStorm is the best around. It facilitates very rapid development without having to hunt through documentation all day.
  • The breadth and depth of plugins, both from JetBrains and from the community, is incredible. There are plugins to do practically anything.
  • It's cross-platform, and using the JetBrains Toolbox makes it so it can auto-update seamlessly without me needing to worry about it.
  • The amount of languages and types of projects it can support is pretty staggering.
  • WebStorm can be slow to start up, particularly if it has to reindex the site, it can end up slowing my entire computer down for a little while. This is compounded with having a lot of plugins active.
  • WebStorm can be very resource-intensive. It will happily eat up as much memory as you give it, at least to a point. This is fine if you have a beefy development system, but if you don't have a lot of memory or other resources available, WebStorm can sometimes run quite slowly.
  • Once in a while, using "Find in files" doesn't find certain text strings that do exist within project files. It's pretty rare, but it has caused a hassle a couple of times.
  • WebStorm has contributed to us standardizing our development workflow and processes amongst the team, which allows us to more easily work together on projects and build efficiencies that save us time and money throughout our daily work.
  • WebStorm is a standard in the development world, and often developers we bring on are already familiar with JetBrains tools. Less training means new developers can start bringing in revenue sooner, paying for the license cost in no time.
  • Using WebStorm allows our developers to spend less time hunting through the code and looking up documentation, and more time actually writing code and moving projects forward.
In my mind, WebStorm offers the best combination of features and flexibility that puts it ahead of all of the competition for many use cases.
I still use Visual Studio Code for a lot of things, but as a project IDE, WebStorm offers a lot of benefits in the realm of built-in coding assistance and refactoring options.
If you're developing front-end web applications or JavaScript libraries, I think using WebStorm is a no-brainer. The only time I would not use WebStorm for something like that is if I have a reason to move over to PhpStorm, or the full JetBrains IDEA Ultimate. But even in those cases, I'm using the functionality from WebStorm as plugins in the other JetBrains IDEs. I don't think there is any better option for an IDE for front-end development.