What are the advantages of IntelliJ over Eclipse?

java eclipse ide intellij-idea development-environment
RonK picture RonK · Apr 10, 2011 · Viewed 9.3k times · Source

I have been working with Eclipse for quite some time and recently got several recommendations to use IntelliJ.

As I just saw that questions of the format of "Which IDE is better?" are frowned upon (not without a good reason) - I wanted to know objectively what are the advantages of IntelliJ over Eclipse.

I know what Eclipse does and frankly I'm not missing anything. But this is exactly what I said about Visual Studio 2005 (C#) before starting to work on Eclipse - and now I can't even write a Hello World in VS without getting annoyed ...

I'll narrow the question down to the world of Java SE and Java EE only. No Android, no GUI.

I'm looking for:
What does IntelliJ give me that Eclipse lacks?
What does Eclipse give me that IntelliJ lacks?

Try to be objective, and please only answer if you had substantial experience with both tools.

Thanks.

Edit: The scope of work I'm looking for is both for working on private projects and as part of a team of several developers working on the same product. But if I have to choose - I'll focus on teams only.
JUnit is a crucial part of the work (personally I started working in TDD several months ago - but lets not open that).
I'll also be interested to know about ANT/Maven related benefits if there are - although my prime motives are to know if I can benefit from things like: Quicker development (e.g. code generation, templates, auto complete etc.), Easier AUT, simpler Java EE application deployment during development (for UT) etc.

Answer

CarlosZ picture CarlosZ · Apr 10, 2011

For me there are two points:

  1. Refactorings (IntelliJ is great in the refactorings it provides)

  2. Plugin stability, I've always found that when I have a stable install of Eclipse, I get a new plugin and everything comes down in flames and I have to reinstall everything.

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