VSCode is clearly a threat as any large firm market dumping is to any company. But JetBrains have seen off free competitors many times before. They matured in an environment where the go-to IDE was Eclipse, also free, also funded by a behemoth.
The thing is that without profits to justify continued investment, executives at firms like Microsoft or IBM eventually get bored of old projects and quietly defund them. JetBrains seems to try to limit the number of free-for-browny-points projects it runs. There are some, most notably Kotlin, but by and large cool but expensive-to-develop new features are things you pay for, e.g. Code With Me.
That gives JB sticking power. Also, Java/JVM has been a good platform for them over the years. The tools they're using are fundamentally well designed and it shows. Classical Visual Studio got knocked out of the race a long time ago, partly because it was written in C++ and failed to make the jump beyond 32 bit Windows. It took forever to go to 64 bit and never made it to non-Windows platforms. The JVM largely abstracted JetBrains from both transitions (albeit in recent times they've had to become co-maintainers of Swing), allowing them to focus on just adding features. And Java's general features and robustness compared to HTML5/JS mean they can ship features and improvements at an incredible pace.
They have historically also dogfooded their own philosophy. IDEA was never rewritten from scratch. It's been continuously upgraded and refactored for 20 years now. I actually worry a bit that they're losing this and becoming more "California" with efforts like Fleet and Space because those look suspiciously like large rewrites rather than incremental refactorings. Space might take off but I have grave doubts about Fleet. The way they developed Kotlin with great Java interop and even an auto-converter tool, and then started using it in IntelliJ development, is a much more JetBrainsy thing to do.
I've used Jetbrains products for a long time, both as a student, and later professionally.
Jetbrains products are free for students, and paid for professional use. In my opinion, the pricing of the product is spot on. My company pays about ~200 euro per seat per year, which is a good price for the quality tooling you get.
In my experience, VSCode is not competitive with Jetbrains products. Their products come with support and good documentation. The proposition is clear and you get exactly what you pay for.
So please JetBrains, do not jump on the freemium bandwagon. Just have us pay for a professional tool without constantly being pushed to some SaaS product offering.
The new JetBrains products seem targetted at VSCode and specifically its remote code offerings.
I've liked JetBrains and I'm paying their license but the current $249.00 yearly fee is still too high and I fall back to VSCode frequently.
The $249.00 fee covers all of their IDEs but I don't need the .NET IDE's if I'm working on JVM languages or CLion or GoLand for instance. I was hoping for something like "Pick 2-3" IDEs for a certain fee, like say $129 for Scala, DataGrip & PyCharm, oriented towards common clusters of vertical stacks devs normally use.
I understand that $249 may not be a large amount for many folks here, but JetBrains isn't the only development tool I'm buying and supporting with a yearly license.
JetBrains produces some good products, but I think this is too late to the game to really compete against VS Code.
Perhaps there are some organizations whom don't want to let their developers use VS Code because of OSS paranoia or legalities, or no option to pay for support, then this could be a nice alternative. Otherwise I don't see this being much of a competitor unless they're willing to open source it and just pay some developers to do the bulk of the core functionality.
I almost always have at least one subscription with Jetbrains. This all sounds reasonable, especially with competition from VSCode ecosystem as well as LSP support improving.
They seem to have nice products but when people compare JetBrains tooling to Vim, Emacs and VSCode everyone seems to leave out the fact that those tools are 100% free. I think it’s important for coding to be open to as many people as possible and the tools are the point of entry.
I've been a Jetbrains licensee since 2012. I even develop a plugin for statically typed Lua development.
Sadly, recently, the experience of being a Jetbrain's customer has gotten substantially worse.
The IDEs were never light, but they're getting slower each year. The occasional several second lock-up, is not so occasional anymore. There's focus bugs, rendering issues, crashes and a never-ending stream of bugs and missing features in integrations.
Compounding this, I'm yet to have an interaction with Jetbrains staff that didn't leave me tearing my hair out. A quick perusal of YouTrack makes it clear that abrupt, dismissive interactions are standard policy.
That said, Jetbrains refactoring tools are unparalleled and I still recommend Jetbrains IDEs to others. It's just a much harder sell than it used to be, in no small part due to VSCode.
It's not the first time JB have come up against free competition i.e. Eclipse. On-going commercial development seemed to give Jetbrains the edge. I'm not sure that's the case this time around.
Microsoft standardisation efforts go a long way to facilitating VSCode adoptions e.g. Debug Adapter Protocol. Jetbrains staff, of course giving a very Jetbrains staff response when asked about DAP:
> Nope, not supported and hardly will ever be.[1]
Community maintained projects consistently outperform Jetbrains support. That's a large part of what makes VSCode a much more compelling threat than Eclipse ever was. Open source is much better organised now.
I want Jetbrains to (continue to) succeed. I'm just not sure for how much longer they can sustain 500+ devs being pulled in every which way. The cracks are starting to show.
Do others share my concerns? Are you planning on, or have you already, jumped ship to VSCode?
JetBrain's Fleet looks very promising. Does many things better out of the box than VSCode with gazillion of extensions. Too bad that popular keybindings are not supported properly yet.
It remains to be seen whether they will find this economical when they are not making any direct revenue on the product.
I understand that VSCode is part of a grand strategic plan that goes beyond revenue, but I seriously doubt that they'd be willing to internally maintain the absolute truckload of code that would ensue from getting to feature parity with Jetbrains on languages like Java or Python. I'd wager at some point the quality would derail, or someone would pull the plug altogether on such a cost sink.
And that's one of the things I love about Jetbrains products. I'm actually delighted to pay for a product that I use every day for ~8 hours and which I think is extremely well-designed, knowing that the money is going to a company of craftsmen who do that, and only that.
JetBrains makes the best developer tools I've used, and while they offer free, community licenses, their more advanced tools still require a paid subscription.
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