Overview

IntelliJ IDEA

Stacks44.0K

Followers36.9K

Votes1.5K

RStudio

Stacks414

Followers455

Votes10

GitHub Stars4.9K

Forks1.1K

IntelliJ IDEA vs RStudio: What are the differences?

Introduction

IntelliJ IDEA and RStudio are both popular integrated development environments (IDEs) used in software development and data analysis respectively. While both IDEs have similar functionalities, they also have distinct differences that set them apart from each other. In this article, we will explore six key differences between IntelliJ IDEA and RStudio.

1. User Interface and Design: IntelliJ IDEA has a sleek and modern user interface, with a focus on providing a clean coding experience. It offers a wide range of customization options, allowing developers to tailor their workspace to their preferences. On the other hand, RStudio has a simpler and more minimalist design, with a primary focus on providing a rich set of tools for data analysis.

2. Language Support: IntelliJ IDEA is primarily designed for Java development, but it also offers extensive support for multiple programming languages such as Kotlin, JavaScript, Groovy, and more. It provides advanced features like code completion, debugging, and refactoring for these languages. RStudio, on the other hand, is specifically built for the R programming language, offering specialized tools and libraries for data analysis, statistical modeling, and visualization.

3. Project Management: IntelliJ IDEA excels in project management, providing a robust set of features for organizing, building, and managing complex software projects. It offers seamless integration with version control systems like Git, supports various build tools, and provides a powerful search and navigation functionality. RStudio, on the other hand, focuses more on facilitating data analysis workflows by providing easy access to data sources, interactive visualizations, and tools for data manipulation.

4. Development Tools: IntelliJ IDEA offers a wide range of development tools and plugins, including code inspections, code generation, debugging, and testing frameworks. It provides an integrated terminal for executing commands, a powerful code editor with advanced code analysis, and a comprehensive set of refactoring tools. RStudio, on the other hand, provides data-centric tools such as an interactive console, a visual debugger for R code, and specialized tools for working with data frames, statistical models, and data visualization.

5. Ecosystem and Community: IntelliJ IDEA benefits from a large and active community of Java developers, with extensive documentation, online forums, and resources available. It has a rich ecosystem of plugins and integrations with various third-party tools. RStudio, on the other hand, enjoys a strong and vibrant community of data analysts, statisticians, and data scientists. It has a dedicated package manager for R, CRAN, which hosts thousands of packages for various data analysis tasks.

6. Pricing and Licensing: IntelliJ IDEA is a commercial IDE and offers paid licenses for both personal and business use. It provides a free Community Edition with limited features. RStudio, on the other hand, follows an open-source business model and offers both a free open-source version (RStudio Desktop) and a commercial version (RStudio Server Pro) with additional enterprise features.

In summary, IntelliJ IDEA and RStudio differ in their user interface and design, language support, project management capabilities, development tools, ecosystem and community, and licensing approach. These differences make them suitable for different purposes and target audiences.

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Advice on IntelliJ IDEA, RStudio

christy

Program Manager

Jul 1, 2020

Needs adviceon

Python

Eclipse

IntelliJ IDEA

UPDATE: Thanks for the great response. I am going to start with VSCode based on the open source and free version that will allow me to grow into other languages, but not cost me a license ..yet.

I have been working with software development for 12 years, but I am just beginning my journey to learn to code. I am starting with Python following the suggestion of some of my coworkers. They are split between Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA for IDEs that they use and PyCharm is new to me. Which IDE would you suggest for a beginner that will allow expansion to Java, JavaScript, and eventually AngularJS and possibly mobile applications?

2.03M views2.03M

Comments

Manabu

CEO, Co-Founder at WinguMD

Jun 13, 2020

Decided

I originally chose IntelliJ over Eclipse, as it was close enough to the look and feel of Visual Studio and we do go back and forth between the two. We really begin to love IntelliJ and their suite of IDEs so we are now using AppCode for the IOS development because the workflow is identical with the IntelliJ. IntelliJ is super complex and intimidating at first but it does afford a lot of nice utilities to get us produce clean code.

551k views551k

Comments

Simon

Software Engineer at Picnic Technologies

Aug 21, 2020

Review

Notepad++ is insanely simplistic. It doesn't help much with the coding, as it doesn't have stuff like auto-completion. Atom is a great editor for pretty much any language. It has a plugin ide-java to support Java programming. When starting with Java, I would recommend it. But, when becoming even a bit better in the language, I would suggest a more mature IDE like IntelliJ or Eclipse. The refactoring and code manipulation tools make it a lot quicker to program. Only when getting started it might be a bit too much to both learn a language AND learn an IDE. So Atom might be better to get started.

335 views335

Comments

Detailed Comparison

IntelliJ IDEA	RStudio
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.	An integrated development environment for R, with a console, syntax-highlighting editor that supports direct code execution. Publish and distribute data products across your organization. One button deployment of Shiny applications, R Markdown reports, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Collections of R functions, data, and compiled code in a well-defined format. You can expand the types of analyses you do by adding packages.
Smart Code Completion;On-the-fly Code Analysis;Advanced Refactorings;Database Tools;UML Designer;Version Control Tools;Build Tools	Enhanced Security and Authentication; Administrative Tools; Metrics and Monitoring; Advanced Resource Management; Session Load Balancing; Team Productivity Enhancements; Priority Email Support.
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 4.9K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 1.1K
Stacks 44.0K	Stacks 414
Followers 36.9K	Followers 455
Votes 1.5K	Votes 10
Pros & Cons
Pros 301 Fantastically intelligent 242 Best-in-class ide 190 Many languages support 158 Java 121 Fast Cons 20 Large footprint required to really enjoy (mem/disc) 16 Very slow 8 Bad for beginners 7 UI is not intuitive 5 Not nearly as many tools to integrate as vs code	Pros 3 Visual editor for R Markdown documents 2 In-line code execution using blocks 1 Supports Rcpp, python and SQL 1 Can be themed 1 Sophitiscated statistical packages
Integrations
Java	Jenkins Docker Windows

What are some alternatives to IntelliJ IDEA, RStudio?

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

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.

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

Atom

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.

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.