IDE : Netbeans or Eclipse

Question

What is the difference in the features of the two IDEs : Eclipse and Netbeans?

Answer 1

The first answer coming to my head is Eclipse is "from" IBM and netbeans "from" Sun

Answer 2

NetBeans offers a lot of "nice and cool" plugins that allow you to do many things with GUI, similar to Visual Studio - web services, Swing (GUI), etc.

However, Eclipse has a far better core, imo - it is very stable, so my choice would go to Eclipse.

I've been using NetBeans in version 6.1 and I was pretty disappointed by a big part of the core functionality - some of it was missing (compared to eclipse), and there were many bugs. This has probably improved in the latest versions.

Answer 3

They have one thing in common: Neither one of them holds a candle to IntelliJ. It's the best Java IDE out there.

This is my personal opinion, based on four years of using Eclipse followed by six years (and counting) of using IntelliJ exclusively. I liked Eclipse when it was all that was available to me. I was grateful to have something that good for free.

But IntelliJ works better for me.

It's not cobbled together from a pile of plug-ins. Each piece works seamlessly together. It "reads my mind" nicely. And the authors are continuously working to make it better all the time. The implementation by committee approach taken by Eclipse is not matching the quality produced by JetBrains.

Answer 4

NetBeans has been nothing but buggy and slow for me. Eclipse has been nothing but fast and stable for me.

Eclipse.

Note: NetBeans has some cool built in UI building functionality, but to me that doesn't bump it up enough from all its faults.

Answer 5

The choice of an IDE is more a subjective choice, but I think that the first question is "What I want to do with my IDE?" If you wont to write java software especially with J2EE technologies with Glassifish, the best choice is Netbeans. Netbeans have also a nice css editor and a good and stable support for PHP. However netbeans with python plug-in and with other things, for instance subversion plug-in, is really instable. I suggest Eclipse if you wont to develop in python/Django and Android but also for standard stand alone java software.

Answer 6

I have worked with Eclipse 3.1 in the past and I have been working with Netbeans 6.5.1 more recently. I have often told my colleagues I miss Eclipse.

• In Eclipse, you have perspectives. You can have different view arrangements depending on if you're debugging, checking in/out from repository, etc. When you click on your perspective button, the window is reconfigured for that task. You don't need to reorganize views constantly when switching tasks. You only switch perspective. No such thing in Netbeans.
• I find Eclipse usability superior in general. I miss some shortcuts badly, like those allowing you to extend a selection to the enclosing block (parens or braces). I haven't found that in any other editor.
• And I have to say I find Netbeans very slow for some refactorings. I don't remember suffering as much with Eclipse.

You understand I'd go for Eclipse.

Answer 7

Hi Sumit,

Both has their own pluses and minuses. And selection will be totally depending on what is the programming language that you are going to use.

With my experience i'll explain what i have gone through. I'm a Ruby/ Java developer and running on linux and using both NetBeans 6.9 (beta) and Eclips helious and using core2 due machine.

Following are the plus points of NetBeans

Really great IDE support. (like auto refreshing). Method navigation (Specially when it comes to ruby) Great code completion with examples Very good Rails support

And Following are the minus points of netbeans

Its a resource hog (needs lots of you processing capacity) Since it requires lots of resources , it tend to stuck the system after 5-6 hours (at least for me)

On the other hand Eclips has plus points like

Light weight (comparing to netbeans) I really like the concept of changing the prospective (java, debug etc..) has lots of plugins when you some extra work (ex : Creating a maven project)

And the minus points are

Ruby support is not that good (through Aptana) Auto refreshing is not there. (Ex: if you add a new file you should manually refresh your IDE to see it)

And finally personally I prefer Eclips

cheers sameera

Answer 8

Netbeans attempts to be a all-in-one distribution, with most of the features coming out of the box. Almost always, there is hardly a necessity for plugins. The IDE also abstracts away a lot of the complexity of the J2EE/JEE applications, making it easier for beginners (at least in my opinion).

Eclipse on the other hand, is not just an IDE; consider it a framework for all practical purposes. If ever you need to use something outside the Eclipse distribution that you downloaded, you'll often need to download and install a plugin. The use of SWT is in my opinion, one of the best decisions taken atleast from the perspective of end-users; autocomplete tends to be quicker than in other IDEs. Despite Netbeans distributions shipping with one or two application servers, Eclipse tends to support more application servers than Netbeans, so this is a plus for the Java EE development crowd. The task management features of Eclipse available via the Mylyn plugin is incomparable, especially in light of average to good support for version control systems and bug tracking systems.

Answer 9

Emacs.

Yes, seriously.

Answer 10

You can do basic java with both, but when things get more complex, one of those will be your favourite. E.g. Groovy/Grails support is much better in Netbeans than in Eclipse, while Android development pracically requires you to use Eclipse. I use both regulary, for different projects.

Answer 11

Related: Is Eclipse the best IDE for Java?

Answer 12

In Netbeans the plugins and tools feel more refined. Maven support kicks ass compared to Eclipse. Eclipse on the other hand tends to get tooling support for new technologies quicker. For example currently Eclipse is the only IDE that I'd recommend with Spring Roo.

Answer 13

eclipse! and code::blocks is quite good too.

Answer 14

Eclipse and NetBeans are both good IDEs; you really have to try them both to find out which suits you best.

I've been a long-time Eclipse user but switched to NetBeans about half a year ago. One of my reasons to do so was that NetBeans has great support for Maven projects built-in. There's a Maven plugin for Eclipse (m2eclipse) but the support for Maven projects is still not as seamless as in NetBeans.

NetBeans also has very good support for other-than-Java languages, especially JavaFX, JavaScript, Ruby, Groovy and PHP. I've worked on a project with a lot of JavaScript code using Eclipse 3.5 and it was hard to work with (Eclipse sometimes becoming really slow, indicating lots of bogus error messages in my code, etc.). The JavaScript support in NetBeans is much better (though I didn't try with the newest version of Eclipse).

In my experience, NetBeans uses more memory than Eclipse (but it's not really a problem if you have enough RAM).

Answer 15

If the application to develop is in Swing I prefer Netbeans, if is a WebApplication I prefer Eclipse.

Answer 16

I am a final year student and have used both Netbeans and eclipse as IDE's. I'd say eclipse is far better than NetBeans. It's light weight and portable. I have installed it on my laptop and copied the installed folder to my frnds laptop and it worked great.

The same is true about updates, I updated on my laptop and by copying the plugins to the other laptop, the other one was updated successfully. The feature of different perspective is really good. Especially after attending a workshop on eclipse and knowing a lot more features of it, I feel, Eclipse is a great IDE if not best.