WebStorm vs. Windsurf

WebStorm is a great product for programming and development. It has all the capabilities needed for education, as well as for professional deployment. I use it in the classroom with my students, who benefit from the comprehensive drop down menus and the integrated spell check. It also has a clean user interface that allows for customization.

Incentivized

If you already have technical knowledge and understanding of coding, Windsurf could be a valuable platform to debug and rewrite code. It was helpful to me to expand coding, since I am not a traditionally programmer. I was able to enhance my base code and functionality much quicker than manually trying.

Incentivized

• This is the only editor in my opinion which gives you the full development experience if you want to code in JavaScript.
• WebStorm supports many different linters including "standards". This has been such a blessing for our team. All our PRs look perfect now.
• WebStorm is very good in design. I love coding in it.
• It has terminal built right into it. I know many other editors also provide this, but I really like how seamlessly the terminal works out of the box.
• Most of the plugins you will ever need is already installed right off the box. I haven't installed anything new so far.
• The rename/reformat functions are very intelligent. I feel very confident renaming something new.
• There is a "validation" inspector which reports anything as small as spellings. This helps us keep our codebase very-very clean.

Incentivized

• Quick code isolation of sytax errors
• quick suggestions on how to correct coding error

Incentivized

• Didn't find any apparent issue overall, except sometimes the WebStorm is running too many default validation check in the backend and response is slow, typically when we keep WebStorm running for some time, and if we restart the WebStorm it will take long time to be "warm up", perhaps, some JetBean team can consider some performance improvement

Incentivized

• Windsurf is target to more medium to advanced users
• Windsurf does fast debugging, but technical skills are needed.
• Windsurf is not as intuitive as I initially thought.

Incentivized

It's an irreplaceable part of my toolkit and isn't that expensive per year.

Incentivized

Great in debugging, testing, developing and maintaining softwares in a number of languages. Great support for many languages and their syntaxes. Great support of many third party extensions and plugins like GIT and html plugins. The RAM usage of WebStorm however could be really improved, it literally takes almost all of the RAM of my machine with 16GB RAM

Incentivized

Windsurf is a good tool for developers with more than basic coding skills. I would recommend it as a tool to quickly mitigate coding errors and issues. I did not take a deeper dive into the integrated extensions, but the library of extensions appear to be solid. An experience developer could quickly launch this platform, scan and test coding, and resolve issues quickly. I did not test this for larger code sets.

Incentivized

I gave this rating because I have never needed their customer support, which is the highest level of support I suppose. When a product works just fine out of the box and everything you may need is well documented, it's a paradise for the customer. But I've seen some questions asked on their portal, and I've seen thorough answers given to the questions and the willingness to support the customer with follow-ups and everything else.

Incentivized

Highly recommend the JetBrains Toolbox, it remembers your recent projects and launches from the task bar.

Incentivized

VS Code is free and more popular. Popularity helps in that you can do pair programming more easily because you all use the same [tool]. It's also easier when trying to guide someone (especially a junior developer). However, Webstorm comes with more out-of-the-box and is generally faster and more effective. Webstorm has been around for many more years as well.

Incentivized

Windsurf would be more comparable to GitHub Copilot or Perplexity to me. I think it's more of a pure code debugging line by line than some of the other tools listed above, however, they all have some capabilities to rewrite and test new coding. It boils down to what toolset you are most comfortable with. I typically will work with two platforms with the same issue to see how it is approached and the differences.

Incentivized

• Our UX guys love the Emmet support provided by WebStorm and enjoy cranking out prototypes quicker than they could before.
• I love the standardization provided by the tslint support. When all the devs code to the same standard, it makes our code more maintainable.
• The test support makes it easier to write and execute tests, lowering the barrier to entry of creating test suite around our code. Testing makes maintenance of any codebase far more effective and efficient.

Incentivized

• ROI is significant time saved from debugging, rewriting code, and testing
• AI generated development can test executable code in a controlled environment

Incentivized