Atom vs. IntelliJ IDEA

Atom

IntelliJ IDEA

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Atom	Score 9.6 out of 10	N/A	Atom is a free and open source text editor offering a range of packages and themes.	N/A
IntelliJ IDEA	Score 9.4 out of 10	N/A	IntelliJ IDEA is an IDE that aims to give Java and Kotlin developers everything they need out of the box, including a smart code editor, built-in developer tools, framework support, database support, web development support, and much more.	$19.90 per month

Pricing

Atom

IntelliJ IDEA

Editions & Modules

No answers on this topic

For Individual Use (Monthly billing): $19.90
per month
For Organizations (Monthly billing): $71.90
per month
For Individual Use (Yearly billing): $199
per year
For Organizations (Yearly billing): $719
per year

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Atom	IntelliJ IDEA
Free Trial
No	Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No	Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

—

All Products Pack (For Individual Use) – $299 /1st year, $ 239 /2nd year and $ 179 /3d year onwards All Products Pack (For Organizations) – $979 / year

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Atom	IntelliJ IDEA
Considered Both Products	Atom Flavio Mauri CRM Designer Chose Atom Atom is incredibly lighter than Dreamweaver, of course it doesn't have the tools DW provides in terms of preview and clicking an element to be taken to the code... but for small web pages this is not necessary. Atom is more similar to Notepad++ and the very popular VS Code... … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Atom For the cost, there isn't another text editor or IDE that has more features, more supports, and better integration with packages than Atom. It may take a bit to get used to it, but once familiar, it's very efficient and feature-packed. I find that developers who put in the time … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Atom Our company likes to keep things open, and we don't want to prevent developers from customizing their environment the way they want. Atom seemed to be a lot more open than our existing tools and has good community support on pretty much any programming language. This can create … Incentivized Helpful? Laura Glover Information Designer Chose Atom They are both pretty good; however, Sublime is free to use but on a trial basis. Atom is free open source. Sublime doesn't have the Github integration or a project file browser. Sublime does have a workspace view option but haven't really used it as much as Atom. Incentivized Helpful? Deepshi Sharma Software Engineer Chose Atom In beginning stage of project, Atom wins the race against them all. I selected Atom because of its support for many plugins, simplicity, formatting tools, open source control . But for large scale projects, atom is not suitable editor because of its unexpected behaviour in case … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Atom Atom supports multiple programming languages with debugging options. Other IDEs also have these features but speed matters. I sometimes feel negative about plugins in Atom but all else is good. Pycharm is very heavy as compared to others. VSCode and Sublime are good. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Atom Compared to its major competitors, Atom is an IDE that does not run code but on the other hand it is also the one which allows multiple programming languages to exist at the same time, which make certain types of coding such as object-oriented programming much easier than any … Incentivized Helpful? Xiaotong Song Business Analyst Chose Atom Atom is the tool that does not run any code but at the same time, it is also the tool that allows you to write different codes. Even though you cannot use Atom on the cloud, but since it is using pure python, it is still preferred. Incentivized Helpful? Patrick Fong Senior Software Engineer Chose Atom As I've explained earlier, I genuinely believe that VSCode is a superior editor in most ways (stability, feature development, the vibrancy of the community, wealth of plugins, performance). There is, however, one more editor to consider, and that is Sublime Text. Sublime Text I … Incentivized Helpful? Suleman Ahmad Senior Software Developer - NodeJS/Express, Angular, MVC Framework Chose Atom Netbeans was a big application in terms of size, so it usually takes more time when starting development. Incentivized Helpful? Samuel Hadid IT Security Engineer Chose Atom Atom is way more user-friendly than other text editors. However, I am not sure if this affects other aspects as compatibility with some languages or other features as having to save a file with a particular extension for autofill to be enabled for the current work. Still, … Incentivized Helpful? Daniel Städeli Business Owner Chose Atom Very similar in functionality and features. WordPress developers recommended Atom. Incentivized Helpful? WA Walter Aho Creative Director Chose Atom Compared to coding programs, I've found brackets to be more robust. Some aspects of Atom I've found to be somewhat cumbersome (JSON customization when GUI should be an option), but ultimately Atom is a better experience. Other programs like Dreamweaver tend to be clunky and … Incentivized Helpful? Jason Smith, DPA Instructional Technologist Chose Atom I like Atom because it is simple and not too complicated. Configurable, full-featured, yet remains nimble. You can not beat the cost of Open Source, so this leaves software like BBEdit out in the cold. Atom is not as hardcore as Vim or Emacs. Less complicated than full IDEs … Incentivized Helpful? Mark Nowowiejski Sr. Instructional Designer Chose Atom Adobe Dreamweaver is really meant more for designers who don't understand the underlying code/CSS principles etc. While it's improved heaving over the years it's still rights a lot of extra junk/redundant code and isn't taken seriously among true web developers. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Atom Atom and Visual Studio Code are so similar it's hard to not compare them. But for new users, Atom is the clear winner. If you are looking for a clean interface, Atom is the winner. There aren't as many buttons and distractions in Atom which makes it very easy to just pick up … Incentivized Helpful? CK Chaithra Kamath Local Software Developer Chose Atom We needed an opensource program to tailor it to our needs. It was also stable enough to handle small to medium projects. It had one of the best built-in GIT integration. It has a clean UI. The simplicity of Atom is why we use it to train new members. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Atom Both sublime text and notepad++ have a long history for being good code editors. However, it's important to realize the changes and growth in the field of text editors, and Atom is simply a lot better now in terms of community and support. Incentivized Helpful? Steven Puringi Junior Software Developer Chose Atom Easy to use. doesn't require registration or activation, you can use right after installation. has the option of packages to give the IDE more dynamics in terms of development and debugging. Its flexibility just gives it that edge over other IDE's. Incentivized Helpful? Dylan Cauwels DevOps Engineer Chose Atom Atom was a program I was familiar with when starting at the company. VSCode, however, has grown in popularity since I've started, and I might switch over in a bit. At this point, it's honestly personal preference. Both platforms have a large user base and accomplish the same … Incentivized Helpful? Matthew Deakyne Academic Services Manager Chose Atom Atom is better than Notepad++ in that it can be used on a Mac. I much prefer Notepad++'s integration of macros for text manipulation, though. It also handily defeats TextEdit. MS Visual Studio Code is better for developers, and may just require rethinking where notes go by … Incentivized Helpful? Jonah Dempcy Web & Mobile Developer Chose Atom Atom is not as great for Android development as Android Studio, as great for iOS development as Xcode, C# for Visual Studio, or even Java with Eclipse. Atom is less-preferred for any of those platforms for me. However, it is my preferred IDE for just about every other … Incentivized Helpful? Dhruba Jyoti Nag Associate Chose Atom Atom has many open source competitors in Sublime Text, Notepad++, etc. When we consider the presence of time tested players like Notepad++, the fact that Atom has been able to carve a niche market of its own says a lot about its capabilities. The user interface is very rich and … Incentivized Helpful? Reges Mendes Senior Developer Chose Atom Atom is simpler to install and maintain, does not generate unwanted files, does not add folders or other hidden objects to your project. Incentivized Helpful? David McCann Director of Technology, Open Source Incubator Initiative Chose Atom Not listed is Vim, which is another free-form editor that is in the same product category. Vim and Emacs are both supported on more platforms and with lower systems requirements and similar versatility, but don't offer the ease of use (both being primarily keyboard-only … Incentivized Helpful?	IntelliJ IDEA Gaurav Gosavi Staff Software Engineer Chose IntelliJ IDEA In summary, IntelliJ is more polished and feature-rich out of the box, especially for Java development. Eclipse is extensible but can be rougher around the edges. IntelliJ costs money for advanced features, while Eclipse is free. IntelliJ offers many developers a better … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IntelliJ IDEA Back in the day, there weren't too many PHP IDEs with proper syntax and code checks, but PHPStorm and IDEA worked great. So great that when I needed a Java IDE the next time, I gave it a go and have never looked back since (okay, I did keep checking the competition and … Incentivized Helpful? Animesh Kumar Senior Member of Technical Staff Chose IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ stacks better against Eclipse or VS Code because it provides better code suggestions, out-of-the-box SonarLint integration, and built-in support for version control with git. It also has a vast collection of plugins that can increase developer productivity, reduce … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ IDEA is the most specific and oriented towards my line of work, however, after using it for years - it's also my preferred IDE that I use for personal projects as well. Jetbrains other IDE offerings are almost as good and I do use them from time to time but IntelliJ … Incentivized Helpful? Dushyant Pathak (DKP) Technology Analyst Chose IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ IDEA has several benefits over VS Code when it comes to Java applications, including in-built Java compilers, Maven lifecycle support, Lombok preprocessing, and sonar integration. While VS Code is largely generic, IntelliJ IDEA has focused primarily on Java … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IntelliJ IDEA Eclipse Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IntelliJ IDEA It is much more friendly to use and has more features in terms of leading to more efficient and productive software engineers. I prefer the interface as well as the code Completion/code refactoring and error suggestions Incentivized Helpful? LS Lakshita Salian Manager Chose IntelliJ IDEA Intellij is faster and smoother. SO it saves development time Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IntelliJ IDEA Eclipse, Microsoft Visual Studio Code and Notepad++ Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IntelliJ IDEA PyCharm is for Python, but otherwise similar to IntelliJ IDEA. Both IDEs are great for their intended languages. I selected Intellij IDEA because of its support for Scala. I selected Intellij IDEA over Spark SBT because it is faster and more convenient. Incentivized Helpful? Tung Vu Senior Software Engineer Chose IntelliJ IDEA Eclipse is just so old, like a dinosaur, compared to IntelliJ. There are still formats that Eclipse supports better, especially old and/or propriety ones. Still, most of the modern software development needs can be done on IntelliJ, & in a much better way, some of them are not … Incentivized Helpful? Nitin Gupta Salesforce/Apttus Developer Chose IntelliJ IDEA Previously we were using Eclipse but due to the ease of understanding and easy to navigate user interface with drop downs, wizards they are better in IntelliJ moreover for experienced developers migrating to IntelliJ as compared to Eclipse. It has an easy to understand UI and … Incentivized Helpful? Chris Barretto Engineering Manager Chose IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ has the richest and most complete set of features out of all the IDEs I've tried. There is the most compatibility across different languages and caters to different compilation strategies. The updates come very regularly, so we know that the product is constantly … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ IDEA is one of the products of JetBrains and it beats every IDE in the market in terms of performance, user experience, and productivity. Incentivized Helpful? David Tanner Sr Software Engineer Chose IntelliJ IDEA Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS) requires a lot of textual configuration, where IntelliJ IDEA provides a graphical interface with configuration options displayed. This matters a lot to me as I don't want to hunt around the internet to remember how to set different parameters … Incentivized Helpful? Tharsanan Kurukulasingam Software Engineer Chose IntelliJ IDEA UI--IntelliJ IDEA is the winner. IntelliSense--Again, IntelliJ IDEA is the winner. Performance and CPU usage - IntelliJ IDEA has a lot of room to improve on this. Eclipse handle the large projects more effectively than IntelliJ IDEA. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ IDEA includes FTP deployment which is ideal for legacy web applications and simple projects that don't use CI/CD. The outline view which lists methods within a class (ColdFusion component) is the easiest to use out of any other IDE and makes navigating large files a … Incentivized Helpful? A. Kıvanç Güler Senior Solution Engineer - Tanzu Chose IntelliJ IDEA Jdeveloper: So slow, crashes many time, leak Spring framework developer productivity support. Best performance with recommended Oracle SDK Distributions and not comparable in terms of debugging. Eclipse: More J2ee oriented cant act as Intellij IDEA cloud native development with … Incentivized Helpful? AJ Ashutosh Jha Student Chose IntelliJ IDEA Eclipse [doesn't] have smart suggestions feature, nor [does] it ha[ve] column selection mode. So, overall productivity decreases. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ is very much focused on user-friendliness which I'm very fond of. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IntelliJ IDEA Much more functionality and freedom than in Eclipse, but it cost you money while the second is free. Incentivized Helpful? SN Sumanthkumar Nagamalli Technical consultant Chose IntelliJ IDEA I have used Eclipse also in the past. But it is slow compared to IntelliJ, it does not offer as many features as IntelliJ offers, and the integrations with third-party tools is not great. But they are open-source and they don't charge anything whereas IntelliJ charges $500 per … Incentivized Helpful? KV Kunal Verma Software Engineer Intern Chose IntelliJ IDEA They are memory friendly. The boot-up really fast as compared to IntelliJ IDE. Open-source and freely available to use is one of the major reasons if someone can switch from IntelliJ. Vast community support is available in case of any issue. They occupy less space as compared … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IntelliJ IDEA IntelliJ is a full featured IDES and has the most advanced set of features for developing web and desktop applications. It supports integration of the Spring framework which is necessary for web development. It supports web app scripting languages and web development … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose IntelliJ IDEA Since we are primarily a Scala shop, I only evaluated other tools based on their support for Scala. As I hinted at before, Vim and Sublime Text 3 have practically no support for Scala as all the Scala plugins that worked were never finished and abandoned and only work for Scala … Incentivized Helpful?

Best Alternatives
	Atom	IntelliJ IDEA
Small Businesses	BBEdit Score 9.1 out of 10	PyCharm Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Vim Score 8.3 out of 10	PyCharm Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises	Vim Score 8.3 out of 10	PyCharm Score 9.3 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Atom	IntelliJ IDEA
Likelihood to Recommend	7.0 (0 ratings)	9.7 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	10.0 (0 ratings)	5.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	9.0 (0 ratings)	9.1 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	8.6 (0 ratings)	8.9 (0 ratings)
Implementation Rating	10.0 (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Atom	IntelliJ IDEA
Likelihood to Recommend	Atom is great for developers looking for a completely hackable experience. There is a ton of plugins available to you, and you can really build an editor that matches your own personal taste. The performance is also pretty neat and does not impact your CPU as much as the competition. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	IntelliJ IDEA is very well suited for developers working on Java, Javascript, and related technologies. It is the best IDE I've found so far for software development in Java. IntelliJ IDEA is specifically well suited for web software development using Java as it provides default configurations for web frameworks like Spring and Spring Boot. For other use cases, I feel it is more than good enough. Incentivized Animesh Kumar Senior Member of Technical Staff Read full review
Pros	Atom is highly customizable and allows for various themes and extensions that can make your code easier to read. Atom has many code hinting features that allow users to write faster and integrate with services likeLINT that can clean up your code once your done to meet your internal teams style choices. It's very fast and manages projects well - Accessing other files within a related folder(s) is very easy and intuitive. It's free! Incentivized Mark Nowowiejski Sr. Instructional Designer Read full review	Compared to Eclipse, basically it is a easier to learn which results in faster learning curve. Good for small or mid-sized projects. Generally speaking developers can be productive in a short training and use. Very rich plug-in capability, such as out of the box support for version control systems. User friendly interface. Responsive and interactive than other IDE tools. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Cons	Due to some default settings, when I opened the file in Atom and commit it on Git it shows almost every line is changed so my PR is looking too big/ugly. I think omitting the empty spaces should not be the default setting. Performance needs some attention. Incentivized Suleman Ahmad Senior Software Developer - NodeJS/Express, Angular, MVC Framework Read full review	IntelliJ IDEA wins as long as the language is Java. Outside that , e.g., in other languages, it is not so advanced. It is licensed, with a steep licensing cost. All features are not included in the free edition. It is not as light as Eclipse, so in a weak system, it can be a pain. Incentivized Dhruba Jyoti Nag Associate Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	Well Atom is open source so the re-new is a no brainer. The only way I would stop using Atom is if the developers somehow made it not function well. Or, if the project got forked to a commercial version or something. Or, there could be the case that development stops or that it was not updated on this or that platform Incentivized Jason Smith, DPA Instructional Technologist Read full review	VS Code is maturing and has a Scala plugin now. The overall experience with VS Code - for web development at least - is very snappy/fast. IntelliJ feels a bit sluggish in comparison. If that Scala plugin for VS Code is deemed mature enough - we may not bother renewing and resort to the Community Edition if we need it. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Usability	I give Atom a 9 because it is one of the most modern text editors built with JavaScript intentionally to allow the editor to be changed and modified with custom functionality that a team may need. I think I would otherwise give atom an 8 due to support, but it gets a 9/10 because of the extensibility/plugin capability. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	There is always room for improvement, but I haven't met any IDE that I liked more so far. Even if it did not fit a use case right out of the box, there is always a way to configure how it works to do just that. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Support Rating	Atom has an active forum and a Slack group where you can ask technical questions. Occasionally, the authors will pop in to answer a few questions here and there, but most of the time, its other helpful users who will assist you. Though they aren't the most knowledgeable, they are at least timely. As for plugin support, that differs with each plugin, but as I mentioned before, many plugins are no longer maintained. Incentivized Patrick Fong Senior Software Engineer Read full review	Customer support is really good in the case of IntelliJ. If you are paying for this product then, the company makes sure that you will get all the services adequately. Regular update patches are provided to improve the IDE. An online bug report makes it easier for the developers to find the solution as fast as possible. The large online community also helps to find the various solutions to the issues. Incentivized KV Kunal Verma Software Engineer Intern Read full review
Implementation Rating	Just download and install Incentivized Jason Smith, DPA Instructional Technologist Read full review	This installs just like any other application - its pretty straight forward. Perhaps licensing could be more challenging - but if you use the cloud licensing they offer its as simple as having engineers login to the application and it just works. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Atom is incredibly lighter than Dreamweaver, of course it doesn't have the tools DW provides in terms of preview and clicking an element to be taken to the code... but for small web pages this is not necessary. Atom is more similar to Notepad++ and the very popular vs code... but I prefer it to vs code because of the themes (although i found recently some new additions that are similar to my favourite) and just the feeling when navigating/typing is not the same, it's very hard to describe... but it just doesn't feel "right" Incentivized Flavio Mauri CRM Designer Read full review	In summary, IntelliJ is more polished and feature-rich out of the box, especially for Java development. Eclipse is extensible but can be rougher around the edges. IntelliJ costs money for advanced features, while Eclipse is free. IntelliJ offers many developers a better experience, but Eclipse remains a viable open-source alternative. Incentivized Gaurav Gosavi Staff Software Engineer Read full review
Return on Investment	ROI can be said as neutral because eventually, we have to switch to another text editor because of many limitations of Atom for large code. In starting stage of the project, everything was fine and things were happening as expected Overall it has been a great experience using Atom in my organization but many challenges were faced so that's something Atom should work on. Incentivized Deepshi Sharma Software Engineer Read full review	Boosts productivity: IntelliJ IDEA is efficient to operate, and with its shortcuts and customization, the possibilities to improve your productivity are endless. Clean code: IntelliJ IDEA will catch or syntax errors, or even suggest a way something could be written better, or call our your duplicated code or unused imports. An easy learning curve for new guys: It's much easier to use than some of the competition, so it helps the new guys hit the ground running by being easy to operate and understand. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
ScreenShots		IntelliJ IDEA Screenshots