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IntelliJ is expensive if you want languages not covered by the free edition (like JavaScript), though, and even if you pay for it some things are frustratingly

IntelliJ is expensive if you want languages not covered by the free edition (like JavaScript), though, and even if you pay for it some things are frustratingly distinct such as if you have a Java/C++ app you need two different "IDEs" (CLion + IntelliJ), and you need to then juggle between those windows. Android Studio is able to work with both even though IntelliJ Ultimate isn't (why, Jetbrains, why!?), but getting Android Studio to work on non-Android things isn't the nicest of experiences. I'd be more willing to pay for the quality if a nice, unified experience was the result, but it annoyingly isn't. To say nothing of the lack of support for things like Rust. That's what this new generation of IDEs is exciting to me - the unified language server standards. Let the compilers handle understanding the code which is what they are best at. Especially if it helps make IDEs less tied to the build system in general (no, CLion, I don't want to use CMake)

noir_lord 9y ago
Intellij Ultimate costs me £14 a month, with the plugins (which makes it equivalent to Phpstorm, PyCharm, Rubymine and Webstorm) thats less than I spend on coffee in two weeks, it's insane value however you look at it. That said I still spend a chunk of time (maybe 30%) in vscode because for somethings I prefer it (it's git support with git lens is incredible) and for TypeScript it's comparable to Intellij with the advantage you can start it, do an edit and close before Intellij has finished re-indexing.
- tym0 9y ago
  I keep seeing people writing about these "cheap" intellij subscriptions but on the website it's 400 pounds a year.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I really would like to see this utopian world where all other professions outside IT also get their tools for free.
    - noir_lord 9y ago
      My grandfather was a master carpenter, he had a saying I've always liked "If you use something for more than an hour a day buy the best you can afford". I've never minded paying for developer tools as long as I could afford them, lots of professionals spend a lot more than we do on tools/professional development.
      - khedoros1 9y ago
        How did he feel about perpetually renting them? Even if the tool is currently perfect, I don't trust that the company's future plans will align with my future needs; I expect that they'll diverge. edit: I stand corrected; didn't see the asterisk and the separate page specifying that an active subscription isn't necessary to continue using the current version of the software.
        greenshackle2 9y ago
        If you bother looking at the page you'll know when you buy a yearly subscription (or 12 consecutive monthly) with Jet Brains you automatically get a perpetual license for the current version. You only need to keep paying if you want to keep getting updates. If you're happy with the current version no one is forcing you to keep paying or keep updating. I can't speak to all IDEs, but at least with IntelliJ you're not just renting it. They even give you a helpful info-graphic telling you how to minimize subscription cost if you just want to get a perpetual license for a particular version: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/article_attachments/203545445/Year_and_a_months.png https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/article_attachments/203545445...
        khedoros1 9y ago
        I looked at the page, but didn't read the definition of "perpetual fallback license". Thank you for the clarification. It still seems bizarre that one standard case is that you pay for a subscription, presumably using version x, and then are pushed down to version x-1 if you didn't subscribe for at least a year under version x.
  - charriu 9y ago
    For a company, yes. Individual license is much cheaper, but the devs need to pay for it themselves.
    - noir_lord 9y ago
      Exactly this, work would pay for it but I didn't ask, I already had a personal subscription and I use it at least as much outside of work as I do at work.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/#edition=personal https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/#edition=personal 119 for Intellij 199 for everything. I didn't need everything since Intellij with plugins is everything (for the stuff I do).
  - pdpi 9y ago
    You're probably looking at the "Businesses and Organizations" pricing, where the org pays £499/yr per user. The personal ("Individual Customers") license is starts at £199, and decreases to £159 then £119 for subsequent years. There's a bunch of groups (e.g. Open Source projects) that qualify for free or heavily discounted licenses too.
    - mpd 9y ago
      And maybe importantly, you can use a personal license at work, on paid projects, etc. I've never been particularly bullish on Atom or Electron, but I think Jetbrains is going to be eating their lunch for awhile at least.
      - jbergens 9y ago
        You have to buy a personal license yourself, your organization cannot pay for it. I just don't want to pay for work tools, my employer should do that and then it is the higher price.
        pdpi 9y ago
        That's fair. Personally, though I could get the business license and expense it, I choose to pay for it as a personal license because I use it personally as well, and I'd be happy to pay the individual license price either way.
  - ajmurmann 9y ago
    I don't know where these numbers come from. I just looked it up and my subscription to all IDEs JetBrains had to offer is $149/year. Given how much time I spend in RubyMine and IntelliJ this is a great price. Even if I wouldn't every once in a while use AppCode and DataGrip as well. My only issue is lack of good Rust support.
- kllrnohj 9y ago
  IntelliJ ultimate doesn't include C++ support, though, which is an additional $100 to get the "all products" package. $250 for a fairly basic C++ IDE that insists you use Cmake is not exactly an "insane value" to me, but ymmv.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    C++ tooling is fairly abysmal. Partly because the language is so darn complex and full of warts. You basically need to implement most of a compiler to get meaningful IDE features. Point being, a higher price point for a C++ IDE makes a lot of sense.
    - conistonwater 9y ago
      C++ has libclang, which is "most of a compiler" and pretty good, so if you can plug libclang into your editor, which most editors like emacs can do, then it's pretty close to an IDE.
      - humanrebar 9y ago
        The reasoning I've heard why an IDE doesn't do that (as opposed to a beefed-up text editor) is that an IDE needs to continue parsing and analyzing even in the face of an error in your source code. Because, presumably, you still want features like "jump to the definition of FoobarClient" to work even if you've misspelled something in a header included indirectly by FoobarClient.h. Compilers generally stop after the first set of errors in the first compilation unit. IDE indexers want to keep going as much as possible.
    - kllrnohj 9y ago
      > a higher price point for a C++ IDE makes a lot of sense. Except Eclipse does C++ better than CLion and it's $250 cheaper. The only real advantage JetBrains has here is consistency with their other products, but then they ruined that by putting it in its own standalone product. So you can't have, say, a Python/Java/Kotlin project with a C++ extension library in a single IDE window, at least not if you're invested in JetBrains technology. Whereas that would work fine in vscode, Eclipse, Atom-IDE probably once it gets a C++ language server plugin which LLVM is working on, etc... Competition is good. IntelliJ is far from complete. That's really all I'm getting at. IntelliJ is not the pinacle, superior end-all-be-all IDE that some were saying here. It maybe is if you're in their primary supported set of languages. But it's not if you're at all on the fringes of what JetBrains supports (not that I'd necessarily call C++ a "fringe", either, but whatever)
pjmlp 9y ago
Expensive?!? It is a bargain compared with what I used to pay for programming tools during the 90's. In other professions people care to buy their tools.
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > In other professions people care to buy their tools. JetBrains' tools have to be rented.
  - dbb01 9y ago
    This isn't accurate. When you now pay for a year long "subscription" you own that version and can use it indefinitely. Exactly like buying a version-license previously.
  - electrum 9y ago
    > JetBrains' tools have to be rented. That's not correct. JetBrains subscriptions come with a perpetual fallback license for the version available when you purchased the subscription. This is basically the same as the previous model where you would buy a license for a specific version with free upgrades for some period of time afterwards. Most people would continuously buy the upgrade license they wanted to stay on the latest version. https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-perpetual-fallback-license- https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
- tootie 9y ago
  Like when you used to have buy your compilers.
digitalsanctum 9y ago
Relative to the productivity gains from IntelliJ it's well worth the price. It's pretty much the only development tool I gladly pay for.
nine_k 9y ago
I don't remember if IntelliJ Community Edition's license disallows usage of third-party plugins for languages already coered by JetBrains's paid products. If not, anyone can create e.g. a free and open Python or Ruby IDE inside the familiar IntelliJ IDE experience, e.g. by adopting IDE-like software used in Emacs, Vim, or Sublime. See also: language servers. I think that the future is "the editor of your choice" + "the language servers you can afford". JetBrains's IDE is already modular, but these modules just happen to run in the same Java process. This limitation of IDE architecture can be overcome, and companies like Microsoft keep pouring efforts into it.
giancarlostoro 9y ago
Dunno I used to think it was, for businesses. But if you buy your own personal license you're paying a lot less than you would for Visual Studio overall. I was fortunate to have a discount for having had a student license, so I got like 40% off the price tag or something. I paid under $200 for software that allows me to make thousands every year. Not only do you get all those fancy Java IDE's but you get ReSharper and the whole family for Visual Studio. I say it's underpriced, and every year I renew they lower the price, but my license is perpetual the moment I stop renewing for a year. I think if they charged me $300 a year I'd still find it worth it considering all they give me in return. I'm able to be much more productive in not just .NET, but Python, Java, JavaScript, PHP and other languages, and hopefully someday a Rust IDE comes out of their workshop.
Others 9y ago
This is tangential, but the IntelliJ Rust plugin is fantastic, and just got officially supported! (http://intellij-rust.github.io http://intellij-rust.github.io)
- rootlocus 9y ago
  If you check the changelog [1] you'll see the rust plugin has been officially support for a little over a year. 1. https://intellij-rust.github.io/thisweek/ https://intellij-rust.github.io/thisweek/
  - Others 9y ago
    I meant "officially supported by JetBrains" (https://intellij-rust.github.io/2017/07/31/changelog-47.html https://intellij-rust.github.io/2017/07/31/changelog-47.html)
ci5er 9y ago
I get your pain ... the Verilog Synopsis integration party took about a decade to get over, and at $20K+/seat, it hurt to have to shell out for 2~3 independent-but-each-necessary licenses (as an indie). But, for JetBrains, at $200/seat/year ... as an Indie making anything more than $150/hour, why would you even worry about it? EDIT: I'm mostly a vi guy, so I don't really know my ass from a hole in the ground w.r.t. IDEs. It's just ridiculous to me that a professional might complain about a $200 tool being expensive. But, your constraints are not my constraints, so I'm probably being overly judgemental. And, for that, if I am, I am sorry.

noir_lord 9y ago

Intellij Ultimate costs me £14 a month, with the plugins (which makes it equivalent to Phpstorm, PyCharm, Rubymine and Webstorm) thats less than I spend on coffee in two weeks, it's insane value however you look at it. That said I still spend a chunk of time (maybe 30%) in vscode because for somethings I prefer it (it's git support with git lens is incredible) and for TypeScript it's comparable to Intellij with the advantage you can start it, do an edit and close before Intellij has finished re-indexing.

tym0 9y ago
I keep seeing people writing about these "cheap" intellij subscriptions but on the website it's 400 pounds a year.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I really would like to see this utopian world where all other professions outside IT also get their tools for free.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    My grandfather was a master carpenter, he had a saying I've always liked "If you use something for more than an hour a day buy the best you can afford". I've never minded paying for developer tools as long as I could afford them, lots of professionals spend a lot more than we do on tools/professional development.
    - khedoros1 9y ago
      How did he feel about perpetually renting them? Even if the tool is currently perfect, I don't trust that the company's future plans will align with my future needs; I expect that they'll diverge. edit: I stand corrected; didn't see the asterisk and the separate page specifying that an active subscription isn't necessary to continue using the current version of the software.
      - greenshackle2 9y ago
        If you bother looking at the page you'll know when you buy a yearly subscription (or 12 consecutive monthly) with Jet Brains you automatically get a perpetual license for the current version. You only need to keep paying if you want to keep getting updates. If you're happy with the current version no one is forcing you to keep paying or keep updating. I can't speak to all IDEs, but at least with IntelliJ you're not just renting it. They even give you a helpful info-graphic telling you how to minimize subscription cost if you just want to get a perpetual license for a particular version: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/article_attachments/203545445/Year_and_a_months.png https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/article_attachments/203545445...
        khedoros1 9y ago
        I looked at the page, but didn't read the definition of "perpetual fallback license". Thank you for the clarification. It still seems bizarre that one standard case is that you pay for a subscription, presumably using version x, and then are pushed down to version x-1 if you didn't subscribe for at least a year under version x.
- charriu 9y ago
  For a company, yes. Individual license is much cheaper, but the devs need to pay for it themselves.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    Exactly this, work would pay for it but I didn't ask, I already had a personal subscription and I use it at least as much outside of work as I do at work.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/#edition=personal https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/#edition=personal 119 for Intellij 199 for everything. I didn't need everything since Intellij with plugins is everything (for the stuff I do).
- pdpi 9y ago
  You're probably looking at the "Businesses and Organizations" pricing, where the org pays £499/yr per user. The personal ("Individual Customers") license is starts at £199, and decreases to £159 then £119 for subsequent years. There's a bunch of groups (e.g. Open Source projects) that qualify for free or heavily discounted licenses too.
  - mpd 9y ago
    And maybe importantly, you can use a personal license at work, on paid projects, etc. I've never been particularly bullish on Atom or Electron, but I think Jetbrains is going to be eating their lunch for awhile at least.
    - jbergens 9y ago
      You have to buy a personal license yourself, your organization cannot pay for it. I just don't want to pay for work tools, my employer should do that and then it is the higher price.
      - pdpi 9y ago
        That's fair. Personally, though I could get the business license and expense it, I choose to pay for it as a personal license because I use it personally as well, and I'd be happy to pay the individual license price either way.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  I don't know where these numbers come from. I just looked it up and my subscription to all IDEs JetBrains had to offer is $149/year. Given how much time I spend in RubyMine and IntelliJ this is a great price. Even if I wouldn't every once in a while use AppCode and DataGrip as well. My only issue is lack of good Rust support.
kllrnohj 9y ago
IntelliJ ultimate doesn't include C++ support, though, which is an additional $100 to get the "all products" package. $250 for a fairly basic C++ IDE that insists you use Cmake is not exactly an "insane value" to me, but ymmv.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  C++ tooling is fairly abysmal. Partly because the language is so darn complex and full of warts. You basically need to implement most of a compiler to get meaningful IDE features. Point being, a higher price point for a C++ IDE makes a lot of sense.
  - conistonwater 9y ago
    C++ has libclang, which is "most of a compiler" and pretty good, so if you can plug libclang into your editor, which most editors like emacs can do, then it's pretty close to an IDE.
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      The reasoning I've heard why an IDE doesn't do that (as opposed to a beefed-up text editor) is that an IDE needs to continue parsing and analyzing even in the face of an error in your source code. Because, presumably, you still want features like "jump to the definition of FoobarClient" to work even if you've misspelled something in a header included indirectly by FoobarClient.h. Compilers generally stop after the first set of errors in the first compilation unit. IDE indexers want to keep going as much as possible.
  - kllrnohj 9y ago
    > a higher price point for a C++ IDE makes a lot of sense. Except Eclipse does C++ better than CLion and it's $250 cheaper. The only real advantage JetBrains has here is consistency with their other products, but then they ruined that by putting it in its own standalone product. So you can't have, say, a Python/Java/Kotlin project with a C++ extension library in a single IDE window, at least not if you're invested in JetBrains technology. Whereas that would work fine in vscode, Eclipse, Atom-IDE probably once it gets a C++ language server plugin which LLVM is working on, etc... Competition is good. IntelliJ is far from complete. That's really all I'm getting at. IntelliJ is not the pinacle, superior end-all-be-all IDE that some were saying here. It maybe is if you're in their primary supported set of languages. But it's not if you're at all on the fringes of what JetBrains supports (not that I'd necessarily call C++ a "fringe", either, but whatever)

pjmlp 9y ago

Expensive?!? It is a bargain compared with what I used to pay for programming tools during the 90's. In other professions people care to buy their tools.

wolfgke 9y ago
> In other professions people care to buy their tools. JetBrains' tools have to be rented.
- dbb01 9y ago
  This isn't accurate. When you now pay for a year long "subscription" you own that version and can use it indefinitely. Exactly like buying a version-license previously.
- electrum 9y ago
  > JetBrains' tools have to be rented. That's not correct. JetBrains subscriptions come with a perpetual fallback license for the version available when you purchased the subscription. This is basically the same as the previous model where you would buy a license for a specific version with free upgrades for some period of time afterwards. Most people would continuously buy the upgrade license they wanted to stay on the latest version. https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-perpetual-fallback-license- https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
tootie 9y ago
Like when you used to have buy your compilers.

digitalsanctum 9y ago

Relative to the productivity gains from IntelliJ it's well worth the price. It's pretty much the only development tool I gladly pay for.

nine_k 9y ago

I don't remember if IntelliJ Community Edition's license disallows usage of third-party plugins for languages already coered by JetBrains's paid products. If not, anyone can create e.g. a free and open Python or Ruby IDE inside the familiar IntelliJ IDE experience, e.g. by adopting IDE-like software used in Emacs, Vim, or Sublime. See also: language servers. I think that the future is "the editor of your choice" + "the language servers you can afford". JetBrains's IDE is already modular, but these modules just happen to run in the same Java process. This limitation of IDE architecture can be overcome, and companies like Microsoft keep pouring efforts into it.

giancarlostoro 9y ago

Dunno I used to think it was, for businesses. But if you buy your own personal license you're paying a lot less than you would for Visual Studio overall. I was fortunate to have a discount for having had a student license, so I got like 40% off the price tag or something. I paid under $200 for software that allows me to make thousands every year. Not only do you get all those fancy Java IDE's but you get ReSharper and the whole family for Visual Studio. I say it's underpriced, and every year I renew they lower the price, but my license is perpetual the moment I stop renewing for a year. I think if they charged me $300 a year I'd still find it worth it considering all they give me in return. I'm able to be much more productive in not just .NET, but Python, Java, JavaScript, PHP and other languages, and hopefully someday a Rust IDE comes out of their workshop.

Others 9y ago

This is tangential, but the IntelliJ Rust plugin is fantastic, and just got officially supported! (http://intellij-rust.github.io http://intellij-rust.github.io)

rootlocus 9y ago
If you check the changelog [1] you'll see the rust plugin has been officially support for a little over a year. 1. https://intellij-rust.github.io/thisweek/ https://intellij-rust.github.io/thisweek/
- Others 9y ago
  I meant "officially supported by JetBrains" (https://intellij-rust.github.io/2017/07/31/changelog-47.html https://intellij-rust.github.io/2017/07/31/changelog-47.html)

ci5er 9y ago

I get your pain ... the Verilog Synopsis integration party took about a decade to get over, and at $20K+/seat, it hurt to have to shell out for 2~3 independent-but-each-necessary licenses (as an indie). But, for JetBrains, at $200/seat/year ... as an Indie making anything more than $150/hour, why would you even worry about it? EDIT: I'm mostly a vi guy, so I don't really know my ass from a hole in the ground w.r.t. IDEs. It's just ridiculous to me that a professional might complain about a $200 tool being expensive. But, your constraints are not my constraints, so I'm probably being overly judgemental. And, for that, if I am, I am sorry.