A popular commercial IDE with a free community edition.A popular commercial IDE with a free community edition.Smart refactorings : IDEA places an emphasis in safe refactoring, offering a variety of features to make this possible for a variety of languages. · These features include safe delete, type migration and replacing method code duplicates. · | Fast and smart contextual assistance: Uses a fast indexing technique to provide contextual hints (auto-completion, available object members, import suggestions). · On-the-fly code analysis to detect errors and propose refactorization. | Android support, JavaEE support, etc: A very complete development environment support. | Support for many languages: IntelliJ supports many languages besides Java, some of these are: golang, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Bash, etc. | Lots of plugins: Many plugins are available for almost any task a developer may need to cover. Plugins are developed by Jetbrains themselves or by 3rd parties through the SDK available for writing them. | Stable and robust: IntelliJ IDEA hardly ever crashes or has any issues that plague other Java IDEs like file corruption or slowness. | Intuitive and slick UI: IDEA has a clean, intuitive interface with some customization available (such as the Darcula theme). | Clear and detailed documentation: The documentation is exhaustive, easy to navigate, and clearly worded. | Very powerful debugger: With ability to step into a certain part of a large method invocation (Shift+F7), drop frame, executing code snippets, showing method return values, etc. | Free version available: There is a free community edition (open source) and an ultimate edition, which you can compare here. · The ultimate edition is available for free for one year for students but must be registered through an .edu e-mail account. | Many convenient features: These simplify the daily work, e.g. copy/cut a whole line without the need to select it. | Slow startup: Startup can be slow depending on system configuration. | Uses a lot of RAM | Somewhat expensive: IntelliJ IDEA is fairly expensive, with a pricetag of $149/year. · However there is a free community edition available. | Gradle support | Built-in Git support | Built with closed source components: The version with full features is not opensource. Parts of the code are under apache licence though. | Cannot open multiple projects in the same window | Student Benefits: Verify yourselves as a student to get more perks. | Embedded database support: Creating an embedded database, running SQL script in a dedicated terminal, viewing tables and their contents, and creating a connection to an in-memory or embedded database is fully supported. | Lack of plugins: IntelliJ supports a very small amount of plugins. Although these are 'quality approved', many features are missing and can't be implemented because of that. | Bugs are not solved as often as they should: They are more interested in adding new features or issuing new versions than solving bugs. | Standard hotkeys behave differently: Seems like hotkeys assignment in Idea has no logical consistency. · Like «F3» is usually next match, «Ctrl+W» - close tab, etc — they map to some different action by default. · There is a good effort in making the IDE friendly for immigrants from other products: there are options to use hotkeys from Eclipse, and even emacs. But these mappings are very incomplete. And help pages do not take this remapping into account, rather mentioning the standard hotkeys. · So, people coming from other IDEs/editors are doomed to using mouse and context menus (which are rather big and complex). | Prices are not bad: I pay $24 a month and i have access to all jetbrain peoducts , so i use their many tools , i tried many others like netbeans , eclipse , etc , they re good but intelij is on the space and the sky is the limit . Been using it for 5 years and i cant tell i got frustrated using .it | Superb, very good plugins, very good technical support. Good start up time. Now using SSD the start up is very fast. I don't experience any freeze like Eclipse. | It's not really a free IDE. The community edition is quite limited compared to Eclipse or even Netbeans. There are lots of plugins but many of them are not available in the free edition. If you spend the money though, the commercial very is probably the best IDE out there. | Has almost everything you could think of. | Very good support not only Java but Groovy.