Atom vs Nuclide: What are the differences?

Atom: A hackable text editor for the 21st Century. 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; Nuclide: An open IDE for web and native mobile development, built on top of Atom (by Facebook). A unified developer experience for web and mobile development, built as a suite of packages on top of Atom to provide hackability and the support of an active community.

Atom and Nuclide are primarily classified as "Text Editor" and "Integrated Development Environment" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Atom are:

• Atom is a desktop application based on web technologies
• Node.js integration
• Modular Design- composed of over 50 open-source packages that integrate around a minimal core

On the other hand, Nuclide provides the following key features:

• Remote development. At Facebook, our web and back-end engineers work on remote development servers in our data centers. Nuclide provides a pair of packages that allow connections over SSH to a lightweight node daemon on the server, making possible remote file editing and syntax/type validation. Of course, this also works for VMs, enabling local development on HHVM, for example.
• Hack language support. The Hack codebase is one of the largest at Facebook. First-class Hack support — including syntax highlighting, type-checking, autocomplete, and click-to-symbol features — has been an important requirement on Nuclide from the start. We're also excited that the growing Hack community outside the company will be able to enjoy dedicated IDE support.
• Flow support. For both local and remote JavaScript development, Flow has brought type integrity and the ability to quickly refactor our React components and apps. As it does for Hack, Nuclide supports Flow-specific decorations and editor features in @flow-annotated files.

"Free" is the top reason why over 514 developers like Atom, while over 7 developers mention "Remote development with SSH" as the leading cause for choosing Nuclide.

Atom and Nuclide are both open source tools. It seems that Atom with 49K GitHub stars and 12K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Nuclide with 8K GitHub stars and 747 GitHub forks.

Lyft, HubSpot, and Harvest are some of the popular companies that use Atom, whereas Nuclide is used by Facebook, Instagram, and Movielala. Atom has a broader approval, being mentioned in 830 company stacks & 715 developers stacks; compared to Nuclide, which is listed in 8 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.