Atom vs Brackets vs Sublime Text

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Atom

16.8K
14.5K
+ 1
2.5K
Brackets

450
752
+ 1
202
Sublime Text

33.6K
27.5K
+ 1
4K

Atom vs Brackets vs Sublime Text: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Atom, Brackets, and Sublime Text

  1. User Interface and Customization: Atom provides a highly customizable user interface that can be tailored to suit individual preferences. It offers a variety of themes and packages for further customization. Brackets, on the other hand, focuses on simplicity with its clean and minimalistic user interface. It offers a limited choice of themes and customization options. Sublime Text offers a sleek and efficient user interface and provides a wide range of customization options, including the ability to create custom themes and keyboard shortcuts.

  2. Performance and Resource Usage: Atom, being built on web technologies, can sometimes be slower in performance compared to Brackets and Sublime Text. It is also more resource-intensive, which can lead to higher memory usage. Brackets is designed to be lightweight and performs well even on less powerful machines. Sublime Text is known for its exceptional performance and efficient memory usage, making it suitable for large projects and long editing sessions.

  3. Features and Functionality: Atom offers a vast range of features and functionalities through its extensive package ecosystem. It supports plugins for almost every development need, empowering developers to enhance their workflow effectively. Brackets, while it still has a decent selection of extensions, is more focused on web development and provides seamless integration with visual tools like Live Preview and Quick Edit. Sublime Text, known for its powerful features like multiple cursors, split editing, and a command palette, provides an extensive range of functionalities out of the box.

  4. Git Integration: Atom provides built-in Git integration, allowing developers to perform Git operations directly within the editor. It provides an intuitive user interface for managing repositories, staging changes, and committing files. Brackets, although it lacks native Git integration, offers extensions like GitPlus that bring Git functionality to the editor. Sublime Text also lacks native Git integration but has plugins like GitGutter and SublimeGit that provide similar capabilities.

  5. Autocomplete and Language Support: Atom provides excellent support for autocompletion and offers a wide range of language packages, making it suitable for various programming languages and frameworks. It has a vibrant community continuously developing and improving language support. Brackets, being primarily focused on web development, offers strong auto-completion capabilities for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sublime Text also provides robust autocompletion features and supports a wide variety of programming languages.

  6. Price and Licensing: Atom, Brackets, and Sublime Text are all free to use. Atom and Brackets are open-source projects released under the MIT License, allowing users to modify and distribute the software. Sublime Text, while offering a trial version, requires a license for continued use, which comes with a one-time fee.

In Summary, Atom stands out with its highly customizable user interface and extensive package ecosystem, while Brackets focuses on simplicity and seamless web development integration. Sublime Text excels in its performance, powerful features, and efficient memory usage. All three editors offer a range of features, autocomplete capabilities, and language support, catering to different development needs, and are available at no cost, with only Sublime Text requiring a license for continued use.

Decisions about Atom, Brackets, and Sublime Text
Samriddhi Sinha
Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling · | 6 upvotes · 1M views

Lightweight and versatile. Huge library of extensions that enable you to integrate a host of services to your development environment. VS Code's biggest strength is its library of extensions which enables it to directly compete with every single major IDE for almost all major programming languages.

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Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 12 upvotes · 1.3M views

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

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Andrey Ginger
Managing Partner at WhiteLabelDevelopers · | 3 upvotes · 517.3K views

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

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Simon Ibssa
Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo · | 2 upvotes · 1.2M views

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

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Pros of Atom
Pros of Brackets
Pros of Sublime Text
  • 529
    Free
  • 449
    Open source
  • 343
    Modular design
  • 321
    Hackable
  • 316
    Beautiful UI
  • 147
    Backed by github
  • 119
    Built with node.js
  • 113
    Web native
  • 107
    Community
  • 35
    Packages
  • 18
    Cross platform
  • 5
    Nice UI
  • 5
    Multicursor support
  • 5
    TypeScript editor
  • 3
    Open source, lots of packages, and so configurable
  • 3
    cli start
  • 3
    Simple but powerful
  • 3
    Chrome Inspector works IN EDITOR
  • 3
    Snippets
  • 2
    Code readability
  • 2
    It's powerful
  • 2
    Awesome
  • 2
    Smart TypeScript code completion
  • 2
    Well documented
  • 1
    works with GitLab
  • 1
    "Free", "Hackable", "Open Source", The Awesomness
  • 1
    full support
  • 1
    vim support
  • 1
    Split-Tab Layout
  • 1
    Apm publish minor
  • 1
    Consistent UI on all platforms
  • 1
    User friendly
  • 1
    Hackable and Open Source
  • 0
    Publish
  • 51
    Beautiful UI
  • 40
    Lightweight
  • 25
    Extremely customizable
  • 20
    Free plugins
  • 14
    Live Preview
  • 13
    Free themes
  • 8
    Clean
  • 7
    Easy
  • 6
    Integration with photoshop
  • 4
    Perfect for web development
  • 4
    Simple
  • 4
    Fast
  • 2
    Awesome UI
  • 2
    Clean UI
  • 2
    Code suggestions
  • 720
    Lightweight
  • 652
    Plugins
  • 641
    Super fast
  • 468
    Great code editor
  • 442
    Cross platform
  • 280
    Nice UI
  • 260
    Unlimited trial
  • 153
    Cmd + d is the best command ever
  • 92
    Great community
  • 46
    Package control, modules
  • 26
    Mac OS X support
  • 23
    Easy to get started with
  • 22
    Monokai
  • 21
    Everything you need without the bloat
  • 21
    Built in Python
  • 18
    Easy
  • 14
    Speed
  • 12
    Session & edit resuming
  • 10
    Package Control
  • 9
    Well Designed
  • 8
    Multiple selections
  • 7
    ALT + CMD + DOWN is the best command ever
  • 7
    Nice
  • 7
    Fast, simple and lightweight
  • 5
    It's easy to use, beautiful, simple, and plugins rule
  • 5
    So futuristic and convenient
  • 5
    ALT + F3 the best command ever
  • 5
    Great
  • 4
    Find anything fast within entire project
  • 4
    Easy to use
  • 4
    Free
  • 4
    Simple and clean design
  • 3
    Hackable
  • 3
    Pretty
  • 3
    UI + plugins
  • 3
    Sublime Merge (Git Integration)
  • 2
    Totally customizable
  • 2
    Color schemes and cmd+d
  • 2
    Material theme best theme forever
  • 0
    Const

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Cons of Atom
Cons of Brackets
Cons of Sublime Text
  • 19
    Slow with large files
  • 7
    Slow startup
  • 2
    Most of the time packages are hard to find.
  • 1
    No longer maintained
  • 1
    Cannot Run code with F5
  • 1
    Can be easily Modified
  • 3
    Not good for backend developer
  • 1
    You have to edit json file to set your settings.
  • 1
    Bad node.js support
  • 8
    Steep learning curve
  • 7
    Everything
  • 4
    Flexibility to move file
  • 4
    Number of plugins doing the same thing
  • 4
    Doesn't act like a Mac app
  • 3
    Not open sourced
  • 2
    Don't have flutter integration
  • 2
    Forces you to buy license

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- No public GitHub repository available -

What is 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.

What is Brackets?

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

What is 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.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Why do developers choose Sublime Text vs Atom vs Brackets?

  • Fans of Sublime Text call it lightweight and superfast. They appreciate its many plugins and nice UI, and note that while it is a paid service, the trial is unlimited.\
  • Atom users love that it’s free and open source. They appreciate its modular, hackable design and the fact that it’s backed by GitHub (and offers GitHub integration).
  • Brackets is also open source, lightweight, and “extremely customizable.” Users appreciate its free plugins and themes and its beautiful UI.
What companies use Atom?
What companies use Brackets?
What companies use Sublime Text?

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What tools integrate with Atom?
What tools integrate with Brackets?
What tools integrate with Sublime Text?

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What are some alternatives to Atom, Brackets, and Sublime Text?
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.
cell
cell is a self-constructing web app framework powered by a self-driving DOM. Learning cell is mostly about understanding how cell works, and not about how to use and memorize some API methods, because there is no API.
Element
Element is a Vue 2.0 based component library for developers, designers and product managers, with a set of design resources.
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!
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
See all alternatives