StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Text Editor
  5. Atom vs Light Table

Atom vs Light Table

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Atom
Atom
Stacks16.9K
Followers14.5K
Votes2.5K
GitHub Stars60.8K
Forks17.3K
Light Table
Light Table
Stacks2
Followers20
Votes0
GitHub Stars11.7K
Forks916

Atom vs Light Table: What are the differences?

What is Atom? A hackable text editor for the 21st Century. At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

What is Light Table? It features real-time feedback allowing instant execution, debugging and access to documentation. It is a new interactive IDE that lets you modify running programs and embed anything from websites to games. It gives real time feedback on the changes you make to your code, and shows how data values flow through your entire program. As such, it doesn't just provide the answers, but instead helps you understand why the answers are what they are.

Atom and Light Table belong to "Text Editor" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Atom are:

  • Atom is a desktop application based on web technologies
  • Node.js integration
  • Modular Design- composed of over 50 open-source packages that integrate around a minimal core

On the other hand, Light Table provides the following key features:

  • Free and open source
  • Cross-platform
  • Lightweight

Atom is an open source tool with 49.7K GitHub stars and 12.6K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Atom's open source repository on GitHub.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Atom, Light Table

Andrey
Andrey

Managing Partner at WhiteLabelDevelopers

May 18, 2020

Decided

Since communication with Github is not necessary, the Atom is less convenient in working with text and code. Sublim's support and understanding of projects is best for us. Notepad for us is a completely outdated solution with an unacceptable interface. We use a good theme for Sublim ayu-dark

539k views539k
Comments
René
René

Sr. Financial Analyst

Aug 21, 2020

Review

I have used and like them both... here's my take on what to use in your case.

  1. Use whatever software your instructor is using when learning a language. It makes it simpler to start. Then change to whatever you like.
  2. Use an IDE (Integrated Development Enviroment). For Java I'd pick InteliJ (because I have found the Jetbrains IDEs great) or Visual Studio as a second pick (because it's free for individual coders).
  3. Pick your text editor: the Atom vs Notepad++, vs others question Both Atom and Notepad++ offer many features and add-ons, making it a long-disputed competition. This is what drives to chose between one and the other, and I have been alternating: On Atom: The good:
  • Good looking coding environment
  • Good autocomplete
  • Project focused structure to your files The bad:
  • Higher system resources usage
  • Slower loading time (if you are opening and closing)

Notepad++ The good:

  • Very light system resources use
  • Fast and simple, with decent code higlighting
  • Loads very fast The bad:
  • Not as pretty as Atom
  • Autocomplete and syntax checking is not that good
  • File-focused editing
483 views483
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Atom
Atom
Light Table
Light Table

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

It is a new interactive IDE that lets you modify running programs and embed anything from websites to games. It gives real time feedback on the changes you make to your code, and shows how data values flow through your entire program. As such, it doesn't just provide the answers, but instead helps you understand why the answers are what they are.

Atom is a desktop application based on web technologies;Node.js integration;Modular Design- composed of over 50 open-source packages that integrate around a minimal core;File system browser;Fuzzy finder for quickly opening files;Fast project-wide search and replace;Multiple cursors and selections;Multiple panes;Snippets;Code folding;A clean preferences UI;Import TextMate grammars and themes
Free and open source; Cross-platform; Lightweight; Modern, smart UI with minimalist interface; Auto-complete; Inline evaluation; Customizable with themes and plugins; Split views and instant feedback.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
60.8K
GitHub Stars
11.7K
GitHub Forks
17.3K
GitHub Forks
916
Stacks
16.9K
Stacks
2
Followers
14.5K
Followers
20
Votes
2.5K
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 529
    Free
  • 449
    Open source
  • 343
    Modular design
  • 321
    Hackable
  • 316
    Beautiful UI
Cons
  • 19
    Slow with large files
  • 7
    Slow startup
  • 2
    Most of the time packages are hard to find.
  • 1
    Cannot Run code with F5
  • 1
    No longer maintained
No community feedback yet
Integrations
GitHub
GitHub
JavaScript
JavaScript
Node.js
Node.js
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Dreamweaver
Adobe Dreamweaver
Solis
Solis
WakaTime
WakaTime

What are some alternatives to Atom, Light Table?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

PhpStorm

PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a PHP IDE which keeps up with latest PHP & web languages trends, integrates a variety of modern tools, and brings even more extensibility with support for major PHP frameworks.

IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA

Out of the box, IntelliJ IDEA provides a comprehensive feature set including tools and integrations with the most important modern technologies and frameworks for enterprise and web development with Java, Scala, Groovy and other languages.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications.

WebStorm

WebStorm

WebStorm is a lightweight and intelligent IDE for front-end development and server-side JavaScript.

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE is FREE, open source, and has a worldwide community of users and developers.

PyCharm

PyCharm

PyCharm’s smart code editor provides first-class support for Python, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, CSS, popular template languages and more. Take advantage of language-aware code completion, error detection, and on-the-fly code fixes!

Notepad++

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana