Netbeans versus Eclipse

Eclipse has been the leader of the pack for the last five years but with Netbeans becoming free, is Eclipse's title of most popular IDE coming to an end.

I have been using eclipse for for about four years, mainly because it was free and to my employers it always got their vote. Luckily it was also very good. Recently I have been hearing a lot more about Netbeans and I certainly feel it's growing in popularity particularly since it became free. I think at the moment Netbeans has the momentum with some high profile releases and the an incredible marketing campaign, you just cannot hide from it. I have also been impressed with some of Net beans new features, particularly the GUI builder (Matisse). I downloaded the new Netbeans and played around with it for a bit but in the end I went back to eclipse because I wasn't that impressed with the code checking facilities and I had everything already set up in eclipse. I imagine a lot of developers have done this and I don't know anyone who has ditched eclipse for Netbeans.

I wondered why people would move from Netbeans from Eclipse, the main reasons I came up with were

1. Hype and Marketing, Netbeans has got it big time
2. New features - Netbeans is adding new features and improving generally at an impressive rate.
3. Speed - Eclipse does seem to be getting a bit slower as it gets a bit more bloated (like Java in general)

I looked for some statistics to see if some dodgy dirty statistics could shed any light on the popularity of Eclipse and Netbeans. I imagine that Eclipse is ahead but when it became free and with its latest releases has closed the gap on Eclipse and that each IDE will be temporally boasted when they have major releases.

This view is supported to a small extent by this blog entry which discusses the growth of Netbeans.

Netbeans growth

it shows Netbeans is having an increased download but as one of the comments says, it could be the same people downloading it more than once and it doesn't say anything about usage (you could download at not use it, something which I did with Netbeans 4).

I continued the search for polls and found the one below, it searched a job site to see how many job adverts specified Eclipse or Netbeans, it's a good point because we all want to use the IDE that keeps us marketable. The results where as such

"eclipse": 653 jobs

"netbeans": 25 jobs

amusingly 16 of the job adverts that specified netbeans also mentioned eclipse so the real results would be

"eclipse and not netbeans": 637

"netbeans andnot eclipse": 7

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=20

I won't really bother putting any polls about which of the two IDE's is the most popular, I can summarize the results of all the polls. Basically Eclipse comes out on top at varying degrees based on who is running the poll. If they are Netbeans fans they show polls where Netbeans is not that far behind and catching up. If they are Eclipse fans they show Eclipse at about 70 percent.

My opinion is Eclipse will stay in the lead because it has so many excellent plugins. More importantly it already has the biggest market share. The open source nature of eclipse means it could have a large number of plugins and improvements. Eclipse does have a large number of excellent plugins, especially for refactoring, code analyzing which are used on a daily bases and would be missed greatly. On the side of Netbeans, you have to be impressed by it's improvement and of course it becoming free has given it a massive boast. You also can't escape the fact that switching to Netbeans now if you were made to, wouldn't be such a bad thing as it would have been a year ago, this is proven by some people doing this voluntary (not something you would do if you were to lose a lot of functionality). Netbeans is improving and it has got an increase of users but I'm guessing that only half the people who download it (if that) actually use it as their main IDE so all the current figures and stuff written about it is a bit misleading.

Overall I think the main beneficiaries of the Netbeans becoming free and bringing in new features is the Java community. Hopefully we will now have an option of two free IDE's that are both good which will push each other to improve their own IDE's at an increased rate. It also makes you thankful that Java is not a Microsoft product where the choice of IDE is very limited.

I would be interested to hear other peoples view on Netbeans and if they have used both how they compare. I apologize this is probably a rather old topic but I thought it would be a good way to hear other people's opinions on the topic.