IntelliJ IDEA vs Nuclide: What are the differences?
What is IntelliJ IDEA? Capable and Ergonomic IDE for JVM. 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.
What is Nuclide? An open IDE for web and native mobile development, built on top of Atom (by Facebook). A unified developer experience for web and mobile development, built as a suite of packages on top of Atom to provide hackability and the support of an active community.
IntelliJ IDEA and Nuclide belong to "Integrated Development Environment" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by IntelliJ IDEA are:
- Smart Code Completion
- On-the-fly Code Analysis
- Advanced Refactorings
On the other hand, Nuclide provides the following key features:
- Remote development. At Facebook, our web and back-end engineers work on remote development servers in our data centers. Nuclide provides a pair of packages that allow connections over SSH to a lightweight node daemon on the server, making possible remote file editing and syntax/type validation. Of course, this also works for VMs, enabling local development on HHVM, for example.
- Hack language support. The Hack codebase is one of the largest at Facebook. First-class Hack support — including syntax highlighting, type-checking, autocomplete, and click-to-symbol features — has been an important requirement on Nuclide from the start. We're also excited that the growing Hack community outside the company will be able to enjoy dedicated IDE support.
- Flow support. For both local and remote JavaScript development, Flow has brought type integrity and the ability to quickly refactor our React components and apps. As it does for Hack, Nuclide supports Flow-specific decorations and editor features in @flow-annotated files.
"Fantastically intelligent" is the primary reason why developers consider IntelliJ IDEA over the competitors, whereas "Remote development with SSH" was stated as the key factor in picking Nuclide.
Nuclide is an open source tool with 8K GitHub stars and 745 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Nuclide's open source repository on GitHub.
Lyft, Asana, and Square are some of the popular companies that use IntelliJ IDEA, whereas Nuclide is used by Facebook, Instagram, and Movielala. IntelliJ IDEA has a broader approval, being mentioned in 815 company stacks & 1065 developers stacks; compared to Nuclide, which is listed in 8 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.