10 ms·

There’s a real opportunity here for JB. If they’re prepared to give this away for free, and make money off of upselling folk on hosted remote dev envs (or lice

There’s a real opportunity here for JB. If they’re prepared to give this away for free, and make money off of upselling folk on hosted remote dev envs (or licensing the server side to cloud providers) then this could actually compete with vscode. They basically don’t have any other product that is competitive with vscode. …but, I’m skeptical they’re willing to make the jump to freemium based on their other SAS product offerings which have… hm… not been hugely lucrative.

davidjytang 5y ago
My company used to have JetBrains toolkit for every developer and we trialed VSCode for a year. There was no noticeable difference in productivity. We then switched to VScode and canceled all subscriptions to JetBrains because we have no more reason to pay JetBrains anymore.
quanticle 5y ago
They could compete with VSCode, but what would be their competitive advantage? Being a pale imitation of VSCode with fewer features and tied to an online offering that has less mindshare than Github doesn't seem to me like it's a winning strategy.
- simion314 5y ago
  They managed to sell in the past a C# plugin for Visual Studio, so people paid money on Visual Studio and this company convinced them to pay more and buy a plugin for a Microsoft language and a Microsoft IDE, people paid because it is a great product (for their projects). IMO they for sure can improve on VS Code, I bet they could sell you plugins better then MS can create and I think this is because when you are closer to your user you focus on the important stuff and no dude with a vision pushes things into a shitty direction. From my daily experience I can oopen a file and see what parts of the code were created in VS Studio or other basic editors, they have linting errors all over the place, I am not sure if the defaults are shit or if the linters are shit but I can confirm I can tell what (JavaScript)code was not made with a good IDE. I worked in Visual Stduio, Eclipse ,Intellij, QtCreator, and VS Code , and I am paying for Intellij because it makes me more productive , this might not apply on your specific project or your personal workflow. P.S. I still use my terminal tools like cat,tail,grep, diff so I am not a guy that needs pretty GUIs and I run an old Kubuntu LTS so I am not the person that looks at software at some identity badge.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    When teammates ask me why my VS setup feels so fast compared with theirs, my answer is quite simple, I don't use resharper.
    - simion314 5y ago
      But similarly my nano feels faster then youur VS setup, the important part is if how productive you are. Sometimes is a good idea to see what makes your IDE or plugins slow, for web dev you can probably improve your IDE performance but telling it to ignore certain files and folders like the node_modules folder or the .min.js files. Though the conclusion is that ReSharper slowness and price is worth it because Microsoft IDE is substandard and for some reason all the MS billions can't find a few competent devs and a competent manager to handle the problem( they are probably still fighting on merging the GUIs or how to name their garbage APIs in Azure ... yeah I am working with some backend MS APIs and their are garbage like created by teams that hate each other)
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Actually the conclusion is that most people that advocate for Resharper aren't aware of VS Rosylin plugins, and most of them are like those that buy SLRs, but actually only need the features of a compact camera, but it feels good to carry that SLR around.
        simion314 5y ago
        I did not work with .Net and Windows in a long time so maybe this time Microsoft done something good, from my experience MS does all the evil/stupid stuff first and only when forced they attempt to do a good job. Question if this cool plugin is so good and is from Microsoft is it bundled in Visual studio or easy to install from a GUI or is still a work in progress and you need to track the git master branch? I still hate MS they failed to promote C# and .Net, if for example Silverlight would ahve been open sourced and made cross platform then most of the SPA could have been crated today with a decent language with a decent standard library , then for smple web pages and forms we would add some JS here and there. But MS had to try to make the shit Windows only then kill it and embrace the JS/node garbage
- kaba0 5y ago
  It will use the same intelligence as what drives intellij today, which can be turned on for the occasional project, yet it will start fast enough for opening random files with syntax highlighting, something I personally use vscode for. Also, what may not have been mentioned, that intelligence can run both locally, as well as hosted somewhere else, eg. on a much more powerful server computer.
atraac 5y ago
I really hope it's free too. Otherwise it makes no sense. As a customer paying for full IDE(Rider) I won't kneecap myself by paying for vscode alternative, even though I really hate working in vscode. If they make it free, they could get a big chunk of the market, especially if they actually provide it with IntelliJ level of autocomplete, refactorings, multicursor support etc. They have quite a lot of money from regular IDEs, if they can release this for free and monetize cloud support, I think they'll be fine. It probably won't take away money from fully fledged IDE users anyway, but I'd love to have IntelliJ-vscode alternative.
- quanticle 5y ago
  >If they make it free, they could get a big chunk of the market, especially if they actually provide it with IntelliJ level of autocomplete, refactorings, multicursor support etc. If they did that, then why would anyone buy IntelliJ? I understand why Microsoft came out with VSCode. They didn't have anything to offer for developers who weren't already bought into the Windows/.Net stack. VSCode was an effort to reach out to those developers and tell them, "Hey, even if you don't use Windows, even if you've never touched C#, we still have something to offer you." JetBrains isn't in that position. Their IDEs are cross-platform (though, admittedly, some platforms are more equal than others). Moreover, their IDEs are all they have. They're not like Microsoft, where sacrificing some Visual Studio sales can be justified as a way of attracting developers to the broader platform. I really don't understand the product strategy here. Either they keep Fleet cut down, disadvantaging it in comparisons against VSCode, or they make it full-featured, and cannibalize IntelliJ license renewals. What's the long-term play that I'm missing?
  - miskin 5y ago
    Maybe they want to sell more Space licences.
  - ReaLNero 5y ago
    I think polyglot IDEs like VSCode serve a different niche to PyCharm, CLion etc. In a professional context, you usually end up doing 80% of your coding in one language, so it only makes sense to use an editor that semantically understands the language to amplify your coding. One common use case where I resort to IntelliJ tools is refactoring methods/classes/variables, since it feels so much safer. My personal take is that IntelliJ stands to gain a lot of developer goodwill and gets the proverbial foot in the door by putting Fleet at the forefront. I mean, even if a lot of licenses get cannibalized, they could always resort to selling user data. I don't think IntelliJ is that sort of company though, they seem pretty ethical from what I know about them.
mythz 5y ago
JetBrains are not opposed to giving IDEs away & upselling which they're already doing for their Intelli IDEA Community [1] and PyCharm Community IDEs [2]. Since this is a direct answer to VS Code's dominance, I expect they'll do something similar and have a free version that can can be run on commercial hosting options, e.g. Space, Cloud & Docker. [1] https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/ https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/ [2] https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/download/ https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/download/
- square_usual 5y ago
  And you can regularly use their IDEs for free through the Early Access Program. No license required.
square_usual 5y ago
I don't see why they won't go the freemium route with Fleet. You can see it in IntelliJ already - CE is more than good enough for almost everything you want to do, but if you want tighter integration with Spring or other web frameworks, you can spring (pun intended) for Ultimate. Fleet could be like that - everything is baseline "good" with a bunch of first-party paid extensions that add a bunch of powerful capabilities - sort of like ReSharper for VS.
- rob74 5y ago
  > CE is more than good enough for almost everything you want to do ...as long as you use Java (or another JVM langue) to do it. Unfortunately they don't offer a Community Edition for most of their other IDEs (PHPStorm, GoLand, CLion etc. etc.), although those are mostly based on open source languages too.
LeonM 5y ago
I've used Jetbrains products for a long time, both as a student, and later professionally. Jetbrains products are free for students, and paid for professional use. In my opinion, the pricing of the product is spot on. My company pays about ~200 euro per seat per year, which is a good price for the quality tooling you get. In my experience, VSCode is not competitive with Jetbrains products. Their products come with support and good documentation. The proposition is clear and you get exactly what you pay for. So please JetBrains, do not jump on the freemium bandwagon. Just have us pay for a professional tool without constantly being pushed to some SaaS product offering.
- davidjytang 5y ago
  My company was a straight up full JetBrains shop. To the best of my knowledge we didn't have the need for any support from JetBrains at all. Do you mind sharing which aspect of support were you refering to?
- nicce 5y ago
  Tools are also free for open-source development: https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/ https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/ And for educational use (teachers) as well. So I don't see a reason to jump on the freemium bandwagon. They offer a lot for free already.
  - mananaysiempre 5y ago
    I wouldn’t call this “free for open-source development”. It’s free for open-source development as long as the developer receives no money. This would literally be stricter than Visual Studio Community except that last I checked the latter refused to work without an online account for more than a month. Needless to say, JetBrains are free to license and price their stuff however they want. But omitting this particular caveat to “free for open source” when important community-led projects regularly struggle to support themselves leaves a bad taste in my mouth. (The same kind of condition was, for example, used to chase curl off the free tier of Travis CI[1].) To their partial credit, JetBrains themselves only make this omission in the first sentence on the linked page and add “non-commercial” in the second. [1]: https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/7150 https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/7150
bearjaws 5y ago
I love VS code, but insisting that its parsing is even nearly as good as anything from Jetbrains is laughable. Working with Rust in VS code is no where near as good as IntelliJ for example, and their Javascript `intellisense` is best in class.
- eropple 5y ago
  I've never used IDEA and friends for JavaScript. Are they not using the LSP?
  - ygra 5y ago
    They've historically done a lot of things on their own for JS. So perhaps VS Code + TS language server isn't quite on par with their JS tooling (which works a lot better with TypeScript type definitions, though, so perhaps it's just mostly the same as well). However, what I personally hated was that there's so many squiggly underlined things ... in red, yellow, green and what other colors, each of which (regardless of color) could be either ignored or an actual error. Granted, that's how easy it is to properly check JS code for whether it does something sensible, but I didn't really find it helpful, especially because issue categorization and accuracy was so random.
    - jatone 5y ago
      > Granted, that's how easy it is to properly check JS code for whether it does something sensible > especially because issue categorization and accuracy was so random Stockholm syndrome is strong with this one. =) the reason you didn't find the IDE suggestions helpful is exactly because of how difficult it is to reason about dynamic language code. the tooling is basically just guessing and expecting you to deal with the noise on the off chance it found something.
      - ygra 5y ago
        I've ended up deciding for myself to never write JS and instead using TypeScript. So far it's working well. I just couldn't really see all that random guessing by the IDE as an advantage. If the only way to figure out whether the code is broken is to run it, then it's pointless to guess potential problems on every single expression because dealing with those takes more time than just testing the code – or results in the developer completely ignoring all diagnostics.
Aeolun 5y ago
> They basically don’t have any other product that is competitive with vscode. All their products are very competetive, even when paid. A license for any professional developer is a no brainer (in my opinion anyway). If they want me to pay more for a next gen Jetbrains IDE I’d do so without hesitation.
api 5y ago
> They basically don’t have any other product that is competitive with vscode. All their IDEs are if competitive means "they cost a little bit but they actually work and aren't loaded with invasive telemetry."
latexr 5y ago
> If they’re prepared to give this away for free That was asked more than once in the comments but got no reply.
throwaway675309 5y ago
Where do you come up with such a ludicrous statement? Try using VS code for python development and then use pycharm before you sit here and tell me that they don't have any other product that is competitive with VS code. Not to mention they have an excellent multi database system management tool called data grip. But you go on and keep using VS code to manage your databases. Have fun with that.

davidjytang 5y ago

My company used to have JetBrains toolkit for every developer and we trialed VSCode for a year. There was no noticeable difference in productivity. We then switched to VScode and canceled all subscriptions to JetBrains because we have no more reason to pay JetBrains anymore.

quanticle 5y ago

They could compete with VSCode, but what would be their competitive advantage? Being a pale imitation of VSCode with fewer features and tied to an online offering that has less mindshare than Github doesn't seem to me like it's a winning strategy.

simion314 5y ago
They managed to sell in the past a C# plugin for Visual Studio, so people paid money on Visual Studio and this company convinced them to pay more and buy a plugin for a Microsoft language and a Microsoft IDE, people paid because it is a great product (for their projects). IMO they for sure can improve on VS Code, I bet they could sell you plugins better then MS can create and I think this is because when you are closer to your user you focus on the important stuff and no dude with a vision pushes things into a shitty direction. From my daily experience I can oopen a file and see what parts of the code were created in VS Studio or other basic editors, they have linting errors all over the place, I am not sure if the defaults are shit or if the linters are shit but I can confirm I can tell what (JavaScript)code was not made with a good IDE. I worked in Visual Stduio, Eclipse ,Intellij, QtCreator, and VS Code , and I am paying for Intellij because it makes me more productive , this might not apply on your specific project or your personal workflow. P.S. I still use my terminal tools like cat,tail,grep, diff so I am not a guy that needs pretty GUIs and I run an old Kubuntu LTS so I am not the person that looks at software at some identity badge.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  When teammates ask me why my VS setup feels so fast compared with theirs, my answer is quite simple, I don't use resharper.
  - simion314 5y ago
    But similarly my nano feels faster then youur VS setup, the important part is if how productive you are. Sometimes is a good idea to see what makes your IDE or plugins slow, for web dev you can probably improve your IDE performance but telling it to ignore certain files and folders like the node_modules folder or the .min.js files. Though the conclusion is that ReSharper slowness and price is worth it because Microsoft IDE is substandard and for some reason all the MS billions can't find a few competent devs and a competent manager to handle the problem( they are probably still fighting on merging the GUIs or how to name their garbage APIs in Azure ... yeah I am working with some backend MS APIs and their are garbage like created by teams that hate each other)
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Actually the conclusion is that most people that advocate for Resharper aren't aware of VS Rosylin plugins, and most of them are like those that buy SLRs, but actually only need the features of a compact camera, but it feels good to carry that SLR around.
      - simion314 5y ago
        I did not work with .Net and Windows in a long time so maybe this time Microsoft done something good, from my experience MS does all the evil/stupid stuff first and only when forced they attempt to do a good job. Question if this cool plugin is so good and is from Microsoft is it bundled in Visual studio or easy to install from a GUI or is still a work in progress and you need to track the git master branch? I still hate MS they failed to promote C# and .Net, if for example Silverlight would ahve been open sourced and made cross platform then most of the SPA could have been crated today with a decent language with a decent standard library , then for smple web pages and forms we would add some JS here and there. But MS had to try to make the shit Windows only then kill it and embrace the JS/node garbage
kaba0 5y ago
It will use the same intelligence as what drives intellij today, which can be turned on for the occasional project, yet it will start fast enough for opening random files with syntax highlighting, something I personally use vscode for. Also, what may not have been mentioned, that intelligence can run both locally, as well as hosted somewhere else, eg. on a much more powerful server computer.

atraac 5y ago

I really hope it's free too. Otherwise it makes no sense. As a customer paying for full IDE(Rider) I won't kneecap myself by paying for vscode alternative, even though I really hate working in vscode. If they make it free, they could get a big chunk of the market, especially if they actually provide it with IntelliJ level of autocomplete, refactorings, multicursor support etc. They have quite a lot of money from regular IDEs, if they can release this for free and monetize cloud support, I think they'll be fine. It probably won't take away money from fully fledged IDE users anyway, but I'd love to have IntelliJ-vscode alternative.

quanticle 5y ago
>If they make it free, they could get a big chunk of the market, especially if they actually provide it with IntelliJ level of autocomplete, refactorings, multicursor support etc. If they did that, then why would anyone buy IntelliJ? I understand why Microsoft came out with VSCode. They didn't have anything to offer for developers who weren't already bought into the Windows/.Net stack. VSCode was an effort to reach out to those developers and tell them, "Hey, even if you don't use Windows, even if you've never touched C#, we still have something to offer you." JetBrains isn't in that position. Their IDEs are cross-platform (though, admittedly, some platforms are more equal than others). Moreover, their IDEs are all they have. They're not like Microsoft, where sacrificing some Visual Studio sales can be justified as a way of attracting developers to the broader platform. I really don't understand the product strategy here. Either they keep Fleet cut down, disadvantaging it in comparisons against VSCode, or they make it full-featured, and cannibalize IntelliJ license renewals. What's the long-term play that I'm missing?
- miskin 5y ago
  Maybe they want to sell more Space licences.
- ReaLNero 5y ago
  I think polyglot IDEs like VSCode serve a different niche to PyCharm, CLion etc. In a professional context, you usually end up doing 80% of your coding in one language, so it only makes sense to use an editor that semantically understands the language to amplify your coding. One common use case where I resort to IntelliJ tools is refactoring methods/classes/variables, since it feels so much safer. My personal take is that IntelliJ stands to gain a lot of developer goodwill and gets the proverbial foot in the door by putting Fleet at the forefront. I mean, even if a lot of licenses get cannibalized, they could always resort to selling user data. I don't think IntelliJ is that sort of company though, they seem pretty ethical from what I know about them.

mythz 5y ago

JetBrains are not opposed to giving IDEs away & upselling which they're already doing for their Intelli IDEA Community [1] and PyCharm Community IDEs [2]. Since this is a direct answer to VS Code's dominance, I expect they'll do something similar and have a free version that can can be run on commercial hosting options, e.g. Space, Cloud & Docker. [1] https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/ https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/ [2] https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/download/ https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/download/

square_usual 5y ago
And you can regularly use their IDEs for free through the Early Access Program. No license required.

square_usual 5y ago

I don't see why they won't go the freemium route with Fleet. You can see it in IntelliJ already - CE is more than good enough for almost everything you want to do, but if you want tighter integration with Spring or other web frameworks, you can spring (pun intended) for Ultimate. Fleet could be like that - everything is baseline "good" with a bunch of first-party paid extensions that add a bunch of powerful capabilities - sort of like ReSharper for VS.

rob74 5y ago
> CE is more than good enough for almost everything you want to do ...as long as you use Java (or another JVM langue) to do it. Unfortunately they don't offer a Community Edition for most of their other IDEs (PHPStorm, GoLand, CLion etc. etc.), although those are mostly based on open source languages too.

LeonM 5y ago

I've used Jetbrains products for a long time, both as a student, and later professionally. Jetbrains products are free for students, and paid for professional use. In my opinion, the pricing of the product is spot on. My company pays about ~200 euro per seat per year, which is a good price for the quality tooling you get. In my experience, VSCode is not competitive with Jetbrains products. Their products come with support and good documentation. The proposition is clear and you get exactly what you pay for. So please JetBrains, do not jump on the freemium bandwagon. Just have us pay for a professional tool without constantly being pushed to some SaaS product offering.

davidjytang 5y ago
My company was a straight up full JetBrains shop. To the best of my knowledge we didn't have the need for any support from JetBrains at all. Do you mind sharing which aspect of support were you refering to?
nicce 5y ago
Tools are also free for open-source development: https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/ https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/ And for educational use (teachers) as well. So I don't see a reason to jump on the freemium bandwagon. They offer a lot for free already.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  I wouldn’t call this “free for open-source development”. It’s free for open-source development as long as the developer receives no money. This would literally be stricter than Visual Studio Community except that last I checked the latter refused to work without an online account for more than a month. Needless to say, JetBrains are free to license and price their stuff however they want. But omitting this particular caveat to “free for open source” when important community-led projects regularly struggle to support themselves leaves a bad taste in my mouth. (The same kind of condition was, for example, used to chase curl off the free tier of Travis CI[1].) To their partial credit, JetBrains themselves only make this omission in the first sentence on the linked page and add “non-commercial” in the second. [1]: https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/7150 https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/7150

bearjaws 5y ago

I love VS code, but insisting that its parsing is even nearly as good as anything from Jetbrains is laughable. Working with Rust in VS code is no where near as good as IntelliJ for example, and their Javascript `intellisense` is best in class.

eropple 5y ago
I've never used IDEA and friends for JavaScript. Are they not using the LSP?
- ygra 5y ago
  They've historically done a lot of things on their own for JS. So perhaps VS Code + TS language server isn't quite on par with their JS tooling (which works a lot better with TypeScript type definitions, though, so perhaps it's just mostly the same as well). However, what I personally hated was that there's so many squiggly underlined things ... in red, yellow, green and what other colors, each of which (regardless of color) could be either ignored or an actual error. Granted, that's how easy it is to properly check JS code for whether it does something sensible, but I didn't really find it helpful, especially because issue categorization and accuracy was so random.
  - jatone 5y ago
    > Granted, that's how easy it is to properly check JS code for whether it does something sensible > especially because issue categorization and accuracy was so random Stockholm syndrome is strong with this one. =) the reason you didn't find the IDE suggestions helpful is exactly because of how difficult it is to reason about dynamic language code. the tooling is basically just guessing and expecting you to deal with the noise on the off chance it found something.
    - ygra 5y ago
      I've ended up deciding for myself to never write JS and instead using TypeScript. So far it's working well. I just couldn't really see all that random guessing by the IDE as an advantage. If the only way to figure out whether the code is broken is to run it, then it's pointless to guess potential problems on every single expression because dealing with those takes more time than just testing the code – or results in the developer completely ignoring all diagnostics.

Aeolun 5y ago

> They basically don’t have any other product that is competitive with vscode. All their products are very competetive, even when paid. A license for any professional developer is a no brainer (in my opinion anyway). If they want me to pay more for a next gen Jetbrains IDE I’d do so without hesitation.

api 5y ago

> They basically don’t have any other product that is competitive with vscode. All their IDEs are if competitive means "they cost a little bit but they actually work and aren't loaded with invasive telemetry."

latexr 5y ago

> If they’re prepared to give this away for free That was asked more than once in the comments but got no reply.

throwaway675309 5y ago

Where do you come up with such a ludicrous statement? Try using VS code for python development and then use pycharm before you sit here and tell me that they don't have any other product that is competitive with VS code. Not to mention they have an excellent multi database system management tool called data grip. But you go on and keep using VS code to manage your databases. Have fun with that.