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  5. Visual Studio Code vs WebStorm

Visual Studio Code vs WebStorm

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

WebStorm
WebStorm
Stacks13.5K
Followers10.7K
Votes985
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code
Stacks186.5K
Followers169.1K
Votes2.3K
GitHub Stars178.2K
Forks35.9K

Visual Studio Code vs WebStorm: What are the differences?

Visual Studio Code is a lightweight yet powerful code editor developed by Microsoft, while WebStorm is a feature-rich IDE developed by JetBrains. Let's explore the key differences between them.

  1. Integrated Development Environment (IDE): Visual Studio Code is a lightweight code editor with a strong focus on customization and extensibility, making it suitable for various programming languages and frameworks. On the other hand, WebStorm is a powerful and feature-rich IDE specifically designed for web development, providing extensive support for JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

  2. Ecosystem and Extensions: Visual Studio Code has a thriving ecosystem with a wide range of extensions available that can enhance its functionality. It supports a variety of languages and frameworks, making it highly versatile. In contrast, WebStorm has a more focused approach with built-in support for web technologies and frameworks like Angular and React. It provides a comprehensive set of features and tools specifically tailored for web development.

  3. IntelliSense and Code Navigation: Visual Studio Code offers intelligent code completion and suggestions, with support for multiple languages and extensive customization options. It also provides advanced code navigation features, such as Go to Definition and Find All References. WebStorm, on the other hand, offers powerful code analysis and static type checking, allowing developers to catch potential errors and navigate through their codebase efficiently.

  4. Debugging and Testing: Visual Studio Code provides a seamless debugging experience with support for breakpoints, watch expressions, and integrated debugging tools for various programming languages. It also has built-in support for testing frameworks and provides easy integration with popular testing tools. WebStorm offers a similar debugging experience with advanced debugging capabilities, including conditional breakpoints, step-through debugging, and remote debugging. It also includes built-in support for testing frameworks and provides tools for running tests.

  5. Version Control Integration: Visual Studio Code integrates well with version control systems like Git, providing features such as side-by-side diff views, branch management, and blame annotations. It also includes built-in Git commands and supports popular Git extensions. WebStorm offers seamless integration with Git as well, with features like a visual Git tool, branch management, and support for common Git operations.

  6. Collaboration and Live Share: Visual Studio Code allows developers to collaborate in real-time using its Live Share extension, enabling multiple users to edit and debug code together. It provides a collaborative editing experience with features like shared server connections, shared terminals, and shared debugging. WebStorm also supports collaboration through its Code With Me feature, allowing developers to work together in real-time and share an IDE session.

In summary, Visual Studio Code is a versatile and lightweight code editor with extensive customization options and a wide ecosystem of extensions, while WebStorm is a feature-rich IDE specifically designed for web development, providing comprehensive support for web technologies and frameworks.

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Advice on WebStorm, Visual Studio Code

Daud
Daud

SD at NSSF Tanzania

Jul 14, 2020

Decided

Despite its resource consumption behaviour I have fallen in love with WebStorm, its the best when come to write Javascript application, analyse code have never been this easy.

To mention few here are the features:

  1. Intelligent coding assistance
  2. Debugging, tracing and testing
  3. Local history
  4. Version Control Systems etc
49.4k views49.4k
Comments
Johnny
Johnny

Software Engineer at StackShare

Aug 15, 2019

Needs adviceonVisual Studio CodeVisual Studio CodePhpStormPhpStormWebStormWebStorm

When I switched to Visual Studio Code 12 months ago from PhpStorm I was in love, it was great. However after using VS Code for a year, I see myself switching back and forth between WebStorm and VS Code. The VS Code plugins are great however I notice Prettier, auto importing of components and linking to the definitions often break, and I have to restart VS Code multiple times a week and sometimes a day.

We use Ruby here so I do like that Visual Studio Code highlights that for me out of the box, with WebStorm I'd need to probably also install RubyMine and have 2 IDE's going at the same time.

Should I stick with Visual Studio Code, or switch to something else? #help

1.02M views1.02M
Comments
Kamaleshwar
Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

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.

1.36M views1.36M
Comments

Detailed Comparison

WebStorm
WebStorm
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code

WebStorm is a lightweight and intelligent IDE for front-end development and server-side JavaScript.

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Coding assistance for JavaScript and TypeScript; Support for React and Angular; Built-in debugger for client-side JavaScript and Node.js; Integration with build tools, linters and test runners; UI for working with Git and other VCS including a visual merge tool;
Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
178.2K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
35.9K
Stacks
13.5K
Stacks
186.5K
Followers
10.7K
Followers
169.1K
Votes
985
Votes
2.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 187
    Intelligent ide
  • 128
    Smart development environment
  • 108
    Easy js debugging
  • 97
    Code inspection
  • 95
    Support for the Latest Technologies
Cons
  • 4
    Paid
  • 1
    Expensive
Pros
  • 341
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 310
    Fast
  • 194
    Front-end develop out of the box
  • 158
    Support TypeScript IntelliSense
  • 142
    Very basic but free
Cons
  • 46
    Slow startup
  • 29
    Resource hog at times
  • 20
    Poor refactoring
  • 14
    Poor UI Designer
  • 11
    Weak Ui design tools
Integrations
Apache Cordova
Apache Cordova
Meteor
Meteor
Electron
Electron
React Native
React Native
Vue.js
Vue.js
Node.js
Node.js
TypeScript
TypeScript
React
React
Ionic
Ionic
AngularJS
AngularJS
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to WebStorm, Visual Studio Code?

Sublime Text

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.

Atom

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.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

PhpStorm

PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a PHP IDE which keeps up with latest PHP & web languages trends, integrates a variety of modern tools, and brings even more extensibility with support for major PHP frameworks.

IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA

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.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications.

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE is FREE, open source, and has a worldwide community of users and developers.

PyCharm

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!

Notepad++

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Eclipse

Eclipse

Standard Eclipse package suited for Java and plug-in development plus adding new plugins; already includes Git, Marketplace Client, source code and developer documentation. Click here to file a bug against Eclipse Platform.

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