Laravel Homestead vs NetBeans IDE

Laravel Homestead vs NetBeans IDE: What are the differences?

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.

What is NetBeans IDE? Quickly and easily develop desktop, mobile and web applications with Java, HTML5, PHP, C/C++ and more. NetBeans IDE is FREE, open source, and has a worldwide community of users and developers.

Laravel Homestead can be classified as a tool in the "Virtual Machine" category, while NetBeans IDE is grouped under "Integrated Development Environment".

Some of the features offered by Laravel Homestead are:

• Ubuntu 14.04
• PHP 5.6
• HHVM

On the other hand, NetBeans IDE provides the following key features:

• Best Support for Latest Java Technologies
• Fast & Smart Code Editing
• Easy & Efficient Project Management

"Easy to setup" is the primary reason why developers consider Laravel Homestead over the competitors, whereas "Rich features" was stated as the key factor in picking NetBeans IDE.

Laravel Homestead is an open source tool with 3.11K GitHub stars and 1.32K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Laravel Homestead's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, NetBeans IDE has a broader approval, being mentioned in 61 company stacks & 45 developers stacks; compared to Laravel Homestead, which is listed in 20 company stacks and 24 developer stacks.