NetBeans vs. PhpStorm

If your organization works with developing or supporting Java applications and is focused on running efficiently with a lean budget, NetBeans would be a good choice to consider.

If your development staff uses other languages, or prefers a high level of available professional IDE support, it may be better to consider a paid option if your budget allows.

PhpStorm is well suited for any PHP development. It integrates well with Symfony, Laravel, CodeIgniter, Cake & Twig. I have used it very successfully in the past and despite not being my go-to editor, I will still use it when working on PHP heavy frameworks.

Incentivized

• Great code completion, just start typing some code and the program will fill in the code.
• Find/Replace is a key feature and works through whole projects as opposed to just a single file.
• Side by side code comparison right in the interface allows me to update similar pages.
• I appreciate the ease of using variable highlighting, with a wave of the mouse you can see visually where a given variable exists in your code.

Incentivized

• Version Control: Git, Subversion, and Others.
• Alerts about code being developed, alerts like errors, discontinuation of some function, suggestions for improvements.
• Application database access can run SQL commands directly from PhpStorm without having to have any other clients open.
• Shortcut keys that assist in the coding process.

Incentivized

• Heavy software needs more RAM. It does tend to use a lot of your computer's resources if you're loading up a huge project and slow things down.
• Problems with configuring plugins.
• With every release of a new version, there are some bugs which create problems while coding.

Incentivized

• There is a bug sometimes, when you pull that the directory structure it forgets all the folders
• It's not free
• When I copy paste the default is to not keep the same spacing/tab pattern of the original, which I'm not a fan of

Incentivized

Netbeans enhances my coding work, shows me where I have errors and helps find variable instances. I would be lost without find/replace in projects functionality as I use projects as templates for new projects. Occasionally the code hints aggravate me, but I understand that it is actually making me a better coder, working to get the 'green light' of a clean file with no errors or clumsy code.

Incentivized

PhpStorm is very easy to use, once you get the hang of it. It can take a while to get the hang of it because there's so many options, some of which are buried in the imposing settings panel. It could use some help with multi-cursor, especially multi-file editing but that's a minor gripe.

NetBeans has a very strong user community. We can find solutions here for almost all the problems we face. In addition, we can forward NetBeans Support teams the problems we cannot solve. We can get quick feedback from the support teams, but I generally try to solve my problems by following the forums.

Incentivized

The JetBrains community is all about helping others succeed, even in the most obscure setups. I have never had a question go unanswered, or I have never been able to come up with empty results in searching for the answer. My questions or concerns are typically address from other users in the community, so timing is pretty quick for a response

Incentivized

IBM Rational Application Developer and IntelliJ IDEA are great with hell lot of features packed into the product and are subscription based. However, most of the features they were providing were moot from my organization's business perspective and the cost was expensive. Eclipse is an opensource product with great features, but is difficult to configure and use as compared to NetBeans. One of the frustrating issues we faced with Eclipse was its slowness while saving a file. http://https//stackoverflow.com/questions/40166270/eclipse-neon-pathetically-slow

Incentivized

Each one of the products I've listed are great in their own right, but non of them provide as complete a solution as PhpStorm in my opinion. Very few products offer all of the features that PhpStorm does and those that do don't have the greatest performance in my experience. Some have a great text editor but lack other critical features while others have a bounty of features, but the text editor is garbage. Before I tried PhpStorm, I stuck to using simple text editors because the features the IDEs offered didn't outweigh performance hit of running such a large, slow program. PhpStorm isn't lightweight by any means but I haven't noticed any of the common performance issues that I experienced with other IDEs.

Incentivized

• It changed my way of coding. In my early days of development I never indented code, but with NetBeans my coding way has changed.
• One IDE for all languages. I can write code in PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in only one editor or IDE.

Incentivized

• Recent AI advancements have saved us time to build by integrating it direct with the IDE allowing build to deployment to happen at a more rapid pace than previously possible
• Integrated AI commit message generation saves time and effort from team members shorting time writing documentation allowing more time spent in development
• Integrated git development causes less friction across team with version control and merge conflict resolution shortening development work flows

Incentivized