IntelliJ IDEA vs Laravel Homestead: 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 Laravel Homestead? The official Laravel local development environment (Vagrant box). Laravel Homestead is an official, pre-packaged Vagrant "box" that provides you a wonderful development environment without requiring you to install PHP, HHVM, a web server, and any other server software on your local machine. Homestead runs on any Windows, Mac, or Linux system, and includes the Nginx web server, PHP 5.6, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, and all of the other goodies you need to develop amazing Laravel applications.
IntelliJ IDEA belongs to "Integrated Development Environment" category of the tech stack, while Laravel Homestead can be primarily classified under "Virtual Machine".
Some of the features offered by IntelliJ IDEA are:
- Smart Code Completion
- On-the-fly Code Analysis
- Advanced Refactorings
On the other hand, Laravel Homestead provides the following key features:
- Ubuntu 14.04
- PHP 5.6
- HHVM
"Fantastically intelligent" is the primary reason why developers consider IntelliJ IDEA over the competitors, whereas "Easy to setup" was stated as the key factor in picking Laravel Homestead.
Laravel Homestead is an open source tool with 3.14K GitHub stars and 1.32K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Laravel Homestead's open source repository on GitHub.
Lyft, Asana, and Square are some of the popular companies that use IntelliJ IDEA, whereas Laravel Homestead is used by Timekit, Pitcherific, and HigherMe. IntelliJ IDEA has a broader approval, being mentioned in 815 company stacks & 1065 developers stacks; compared to Laravel Homestead, which is listed in 21 company stacks and 24 developer stacks.
