Brackets vs IntelliJ IDEA: What are the differences?
Developers describe Brackets as "A modern, open source text editor that understands web design". With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, Brackets is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser. Try Creative Cloud Extract (preview) for Brackets for an easy way to get clean, minimal CSS straight from a PSD with no generated code. On the other hand, IntelliJ IDEA is detailed as "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.
Brackets and IntelliJ IDEA are primarily classified as "Text Editor" and "Integrated Development Environment" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Brackets are:
- Code Hints from a PSD
- Inline Editors
- Live Preview
On the other hand, IntelliJ IDEA provides the following key features:
- Smart Code Completion
- On-the-fly Code Analysis
- Advanced Refactorings
"Beautiful UI" is the primary reason why developers consider Brackets over the competitors, whereas "Fantastically intelligent" was stated as the key factor in picking IntelliJ IDEA.
Brackets is an open source tool with 29.9K GitHub stars and 6.42K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Brackets's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, IntelliJ IDEA has a broader approval, being mentioned in 815 company stacks & 1065 developers stacks; compared to Brackets, which is listed in 36 company stacks and 32 developer stacks.