Java Full-Stack Index Q1/2023: IDEs
The content of this page is identical throughout Q1/2023 - January, February, and March.
Summary for Q1/2023
- Popularity trend: Eclipse is the most popular Java IDE and leads IntelliJ in job ads 2.5:1, though it has declined over many years in other categories. IntelliJ holds up well for a commercial product: It’s only slightly behind Eclipse in Google searches and slightly ahead in questions at Stack Overflow. NetBeans is the least popular IDE. VS Code isn’t a fully-fledged Java IDE, but apart from jobs, it’s 3-4 times as popular as Eclipse & IntelliJ.
- If you don’t want to spend money, then use Eclipse.
- If you may spend money, evaluate IntelliJ.
- Evaluate VS Code for non-Java work, like web development (I use it for all my websites).
- If you’re using NetBeans, consider moving off of it.
Archive
| 2022 | Q4 | Q3 |
Table Of Contents
Choices
Here are the choices in alphabetical order:
- Eclipse IDE
- IntelliJ IDEA
- NetBeans
- Visual Studio Code (“VS Code”)
Please note:
- IntelliJ is the only commercial IDE on this list. The free Community edition lacks crucial features of the Ultimate Edition, such as tools for Spring, Jakarta EE, and web development. Please see here for pricing. You can also buy the “All Products Pack”, which may be a better value (I use DataGrip for databases).
- Microsoft doesn’t position VS Code as a fully-fledged IDE and is “not made to compete with IntelliJ directly in that realm”.
Popularity
Why Popularity - and How?
Picking a popular technology makes our developer life easier: Easier to learn, easier to build, debug & deploy, easier to find jobs/hire, and easier to convince teammates & bosses. Now popularity can make a difference in two situations: When multiple technologies score similarly, we could go for the most popular one. And when a technology is very unpopular, we may not use it.
I measure popularity among employers and developers as the trend between competing technologies. I count mentions in job ads at Indeed for employer popularity. For developer popularity, I use Google searches, Udemy course buyers, and Stack Overflow questions.
Employers: Job Ads
The Indeed job search is active in 62 countries. I picked 59 countries representing 69% of the worldwide GDP in 2022, excluding three countries because English word searches proved ineffective there: China, Japan, and South Korea. Job searches demonstrate the willingness of organizations to pay for a technology - the strongest indicator of popularity in my mind. IntelliJ is the baseline.
This is the first time I exclude China, Japan, and South Korea from the ranking because English word searches proved ineffective there. I adjusted all past numbers as well for this issue, so they are different from past issues. And because of technical difficulties on my end, I don’t have the numbers for October 2022.
For comparison, here’s the last chart version with China, Japan, and South Korea from Q4/2022. These are the differences:
- Eclipse declines less until September.
- VS Code is about 20% lower generally.
Eclipse wins, IntelliJ is second, VS Code is third, and NetBeans last. After a decline in the summer, Eclipse and VS Code have rallied in the fall: Eclipse leads IntelliJ now 2.5:1, VS Code nearly caught IntelliJ with 94%. Why? Because in absolute numbers, IntelliJ lost a quarter of its mentions in the last six months. The Eclipse numbers may be a bit too high, as Eclipse also has many frameworks, and the search only checks for “Eclipse”, not “Eclipse IDE”. NetBeans is the only IDE that increased its absolute numbers, though only by 4% and from a low starting point, to 21% of IntelliJ’s numbers.
Please see here for details, caveats, and adjustments to the job ad mentions.
You can find the detailed search results with links here. They include breakdowns by continents:
Developers
Students at Udemy
Udemy is one of the biggest online learning sites. They publish the number of people who bought a course (beyond a certain threshold, possibly around 100k). This shows how many people evaluate a technology. This time, Eclipse is the baseline.
VS Code wins, and Eclipse is second. VS Code leads Eclipse 3.1:1 and very slowly pulls away. Neither IntelliJ nor NetBeans has enough students for Udemy to reveal their number.
Here are the links that show the courses for all and the number of students for some:
Google Searches
Google Trends demonstrates the initial interest in a technology over time. “More searches = better” to me.
Google changed its measurement algorithms on January 1, 2016, and January 1, 2022. That caused spikes for all values, especially in 2022.
This link produces the chart above.
The decline of Eclipse (since 2005) and NetBeans (since 2009) is clearly visible, as is the rise of VS Code. Let’s zoom in on the last three years:
This link produces the chart above.
VS Code wins, Eclipse is second, IntelliJ is third, and NetBeans is fourth. VS Code lost 17% of its all-time peak in September. Eclipse has spikes around its quarterly releases but is slightly down compared to three years ago, while IntelliJ is slightly up in the same time frame. Netbeans is flat overall.
Questions at Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow Trends shows which percentage of questions at Stack Overflow has a particular technology tag. It is a proxy for using a technology during evaluation and productive use. “More questions = better” to me.
This link produces the chart above.
VS Code wins, IntelliJ is second, Eclipse is third, and NetBeans is fourth. VS Code has risen for seven years and is 8% below its all-time peak from mid-2022. Eclipse and NetBeans have declined for more than eight years. After four years of decline, IntelliJ may have stabilized at 0.2%.
Analysis
- Eclipse: Despite its decline, it’s still the most popular free Java IDE. The free IntelliJ Community Edition is no competition as it lacks support for back-end frameworks like Spring or Jakarta EE and web frameworks. But the cracks show: In Stack Overflow’s “2022 Developer Survey”, 72% of 8,866 respondents dread using Eclipse. And VS Code puts Eclipse on notice. So Eclipse has a VS Code competitor in the works.
- IntelliJ: In a world where everybody and their dog offer us free development tools, IntelliJ Ultimate Edition stands out as a product people are willing to pay for. Why? Because developers are happy with it: In Stack Overflow’s “2022 Developer Survey”, 68% of 19,723 developers love IntelliJ. Still, JetBrains also works on a VS Code clone.
- NetBeans: Moving from Sun to Oracle to Apache hasn’t done the oldest Java IDE in this list any good. It competes against the much more popular Eclipse IDE, not to mention VS Code. Feature-wise, there isn’t anything really to set NetBeans apart from Eclipse. And in Stack Overflow’s “2022 Developer Survey”, 77% of 8,866 respondents dread using NetBeans. That’s the worst score there. A low popularity also means getting fewer plugins than the other IDEs.
- VS Code: It may not be a fully-fledged Java IDE. But it is something we developers have never had - a free, fast, cross-platform, cross-language IDE. And developers love it: In Stack Overflow’s “2021 Developer Survey”, VS Code took the top IDE spot (I don’t count Neovim as an actual IDE). 81% of 52,523 developers loved it - that’s 2% more than last year. The only way is up for VS Code!
So here’s my recommendation:
- If you don’t want to spend money, then use Eclipse.
- If you may spend money, evaluate IntelliJ.
- Evaluate VS Code for non-Java work, like web development (I use it for all my websites).
- If you’re using NetBeans, consider moving off of it.