Atom

Score9.5 out of 10

90 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Atom are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Highly Customizable: Many users have praised Atom for its high level of customization. They appreciate the ability to tailor their coding environment to their preferences, with various themes and extensions available. This feature allows them to make their code easier to read and navigate, enhancing their overall coding experience.

Code Hinting Features: Several reviewers have been impressed with Atom's code hinting capabilities. This feature helps them write code faster and integrates well with services like LINT, allowing them to clean up their code according to their team's style choices. Users find this functionality particularly useful in speeding up their coding process.

Free Software: The fact that Atom is free has been seen as a major advantage by many users. They appreciate not having to invest in expensive software while still being able to access a robust coding environment. This affordability makes it accessible to a wide range of developers.

Reviews

31 Reviews

Joyful coding

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

January 2, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Atom for coding emails. I was having a weird problem with Dreamweaver (the licensed software my team uses) for which the program would lag, despite having the same machine as other members... so I picked Atom, which I knew was freely available and I had used in a previous job.

Atom works flawlessly, it's super lightweight, and has wonderful themes that are really pleasing to the eye compared to Dreamweaver or Visual Studio Code

Pros

Lightweight
Beautiful themes
Plugins
Customisable
Easily integrates with version control

Cons

remember window configuration (reopens always the same panels despite closing them)
remember code preferences (I use word wrap and i have to switch it on every document)

Likelihood to Recommend

Atom is great for simple HTML coding. It's fast, has intuitive shortcuts and several options. I particularly love the "convert spaces to tabs" function that I haven't seen in other editors.

I'm not sure how it would fair in more serious web development today, if there are plugins for live updates of the page you are working on...

But the problem is that it has been discontinued so you know there are no new features or fixes coming through.

Flavio Mauri

CRM Designer in Marketing at Asda (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

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Atom for all your text editing needs

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

October 27, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My organization allows us to choose what IDE/text editor we would like to use, and Atom is a popular choice among developers. One of the biggest business problems that Atom addresses is how to efficiently collaborate with other developers while working remotely. Some of its features make it the best possible option for effective and efficient remote collaboration.

Pros

Remote collaboration
Customization
Source code integration

Cons

Ease of use
Documentation

Likelihood to Recommend

Atom is perfectly suited for a developer that wants a highly capable and highly customizable IDE to work in. It has several available packages to integrate with pretty much anything you want and is backed by Github, so that's a huge plus as well. A possible scenario where Atom may not be best suited would be on machines that are a bit slow, as Atom doesn't seem as fast as other text editors or IDE's.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Ideal editor for developers interested in fully customizing their experience

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

October 26, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Atom is a powerful editor that is being used by development teams for coding in any given programming language. We were looking to unify the developer's experience and work on a single platform, as opposed to everyone having their own editor. Although it is not made mandatory, we had a pretty good and quick adoption of the product throughout the years. Atom is very customizable, which helps tremendously.

Pros

Lightweight, intuitive interface that is almost self-explanatory
Highly customizable (themes, plugins, language support)
Great community support with open-source extensions

Cons

Some stability issues such as intermittent crashes
Developers with advanced needs will not find equivalents to VS Studio
Managing plugins at the corporate level can be cumbersome

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.

Verified User

Team Lead in Professional Services (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Atom is a Good looking free editor and scripting tool for developers

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

October 12, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Atom is my favourite free, open-source editor. We have use Atom in our development projects. We have used it as a collaboration tool by integrating with Git hub - it was easy to set it up so that the team can work on the same project at the same time from different computers. The code syntax is coloured by language type - which is helpful to see your code. We use it for HTML, JS, CSS, Sass, and PHP editing.

Pros

HTML, CSS, PHP and other code or text editing
Project collaboration with team and developers
Free and Open Source
Good looking interface
Colour coded syntax

Cons

High start-up time

Likelihood to Recommend

Atom is a great scripting tool for individuals, freelancers, and small development teams. The interface is slick, and if you require bits of functionality, there are packages which you can add on. No accounts or activation code - just download it, and the user can start coding and launching their web development project in a flash. I sometimes use it for the find and replace function for modifying and editing large batches of plain text.

Laura Glover

Information Designer in Professional Services at The Pixel Zoo (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

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Atom - A simplest, finest , open-source text editor

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 28, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Atom is used by only the development team in my organization. Atom has a simple UI that makes users use it without any issues. It has support for GitHub and has a lot of plugins. Along with this, a user can write its own plugin. Support code formating for different languages and its minimap feature also helps sometimes. It is being used to develop clean, well-structured code for our product. It is simply perfect because of everything it provides. The next best thing about Atom is that you have git control over it which helps to make things super easy in terms of open sourcing.

Pros

Adding packages in preferable language
Formatting of code making it easy to read for all users
Support for GitHub and plugins and plugin development
It is able to handle large amounts of data without slowing down

Cons

There should be a better user tips manual page to learn keyboard shortcuts
It would also be beneficial if mathematical and data analytic tools were added
it has quite high start-up timing when you open large projects to work on it
Sometimes, atom closed suddenly and do not open again
It still lacks better options with the previews even though there are already some by users adding plugins
It doesn't have self-correct features for lint errors, unlike IntelliJ

Likelihood to Recommend

Atom is well suited for users who just beginning with their development careers. For developing production level or at the local level, for any use-case Atom is well suited as it provides support for many plugins and version control too. It is not suitable for heavy projects because it takes a lot of time in getting opened and also stops unexpectedly in between. It can be used by early-stage startups who are just beginning their project but when there is an ample amount of code, then they must switch to some other software.

Deepshi Sharma

Software Engineer in Engineering at Kognoz Consulting (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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Beautiful experience with Atom IDE

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 8, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Atom IDE is a very nice application having inbuilt CLI and it supports multiple extensions and programming languages. I and our coder are using Atom and VS Code mainly because these applications are easy to use and need very low system configurations.

Pros

Integrated CLI
Lightweight
Easy to user
Support extensions

Cons

Affects performance
Plugins issues
Support GIT

Likelihood to Recommend

I have been using this product since my college days when I had a very low system configuration PC. It's a very good application but sometimes the mix plugins back-end gives unnecessary errors. All features like multiple programming language support, extensions, etc. are personally good. Sometimes we face performance effects when using for the last many hours.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Atom data scientists overall satisfaction

Rating: 10 out of 10

March 30, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Atom is being used across the entire organization and most of the data scientists in my company are currently using it under local environment. Even though Atom is just an option and not required to be used, most of my colleagues including myself prefer to use it due to its interface.

Pros

Easy.
Clear.
Multi-language.

Cons

Cloud base.
ec2.
Execution.

Likelihood to Recommend

Atom is suitable if you are a data scientist who is not easily [intimidated] with code and object oriented programming layout, and actively working on either creating or improving multiple python packages under different environments locally. It is less appropriate for a business analyst who is not used to writing code.

Verified User

Analyst in Professional Services (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Best local tool, wish to have it on the cloud

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 23, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Atom is widely used in my organization for data scientists. Even though the IDE is not required it is preferred by most of our data scientists. Compared to other IDEs such as PyCharm, the tool is allowing the users to edit multiple codes instead of only python but also R and unix.

Pros

Integration.
Easy to check.
Nice structure.

Cons

Cannot run code directly.
Not working with notebook.
Wish it can be added onto ec2.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are working on the local environment and with multiple type of code in the same time, Atom is one of the best tools you can choose from the market. However, if your work need tons of RAM and you have to get it to run on the cloud, it is not suitable.

Xiaotong Song

Business Analyst in Corporate at 3M (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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Solid editor but since eclipsed by VSCode

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

February 15, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used to use Atom as our code editor of choice for our dynamically typed language. Atom comes with fantastic syntax highlighting and other plugins out of the box that make writing code a breeze. Whenever we have to write HTML, CSS, Javascript, or Python, we used to use Atom. Some engineers also use Atom with some extra plugins for quick text manipulation, such as when they need to format strips, strip out lots of whitespaces, or prefix an unnumbered list with numbers. We have since switched over to VSCode (more on that later), but I would say that Atom is still a good choice if you are already using it.

Pros

Cross platform support for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Helpful community of people on the forums to ask for help.

Cons

Development on the Atom source code has greatly stalled since Microsoft purchased GitHub.
Many plugin developers moved their plugins onto VSCode and stopped maintaining their Atom version.

Likelihood to Recommend

My recommendation depends on whether my colleague is already using Atom or not. If they are not using Atom, I sincerely find VSCode to be a slightly better editor with a much brighter future in terms of feature development, upcoming plugins, and support. So they should start with VSCode. However, if they are already using Atom, I see no reason to switch for the time being. Atom was a great editor for a long time, and though feature development has stalled, it continues to perform well. It will meet most people's needs when it comes to editing dynamically typed languages.

Patrick Fong

Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at Iterable (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Used Atom about 1 year

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

January 30, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our organization (software house), it is totally developers' choice in the engineering department to choose the IDE of their own choice. I was impressed by the shortcuts of Atom like Toggle Comment, Column Selection, Select Same Words, etc. and to install the Packages for ease of development. So that's why I migrated to it.

Pros

Built-in package manager.
Smart auto completion feature was great.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Features that Atom has provided were superb. I was able to do a lot of things with shortcuts like duplicate word selections, tree hierarchy of folders, the drag/drop file/folder support, etc.

Suleman Ahmad

Senior Software Developer - NodeJS/Express, Angular, MVC Framework in Engineering at CareAxiom (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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Atom - A simplest, finest , open-source text editor

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 28, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Adding packages in preferable language
Formatting of code making it easy to read for all users
Support for GitHub and plugins and plugin development
It is able to handle large amounts of data without slowing down

Cons

There should be a better user tips manual page to learn keyboard shortcuts
It would also be beneficial if mathematical and data analytic tools were added
it has quite high start-up timing when you open large projects to work on it
Sometimes, atom closed suddenly and do not open again
It still lacks better options with the previews even though there are already some by users adding plugins
It doesn't have self-correct features for lint errors, unlike IntelliJ

Likelihood to Recommend

Deepshi Sharma

Software Engineer in Engineering at Kognoz Consulting (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile