PhpStorm vs. The Welkin Suite

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

It is well suited to development-oriented projects. I find it faster to use the native Salesforce UI for more configuration projects. There are a number of tools in the suite that I have not used and probably could get more value out of it, but it has served well as my primary IDE for the last few months.

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

• Local History - Without having to setup GitHub this has been a time saver!
• AutoComplete
• Saves the entire project at once

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

• It would be nice if IDE feature releases were timed to coincide with Salesforce releases (i.e. make Lightning Web Components available on the day they become available in Salesforce instances).
• The IDE can be a bit buggy especially when you have several windows of the IDE open to different Salesforce instances at the same time on one machine.
• Sometimes, when you click to retrieve your data too soon, before the program has a chance to ask you to connect to the instance, it can cause the IDE to freeze.

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.

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

In general, when you need support there is someone there to give you an answer. I think there could be an improvement in this area, but it's hard to provide a substantial amount of support for a product that is charging roughly $15 a month. Do I feel I get more than $15 worth of support value when I need to request it? Yes.

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

I have tried using the Developer Console, Microsoft's Visual Studio Code with the Salesforce plugins and also Mavens Mate along with Sublime. The latter is deprecated. The rest are either options that are not as fully featured as The Welkin Suite or their setup time is much greater.

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

• I have probably saved about three hours, on larger projects.
• It has definitely saved me the overhead of having to work with other IDEs that have heavier setup requirements.

Incentivized