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.
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.
JetBrains is in a tough market where they charge for what other competitors give away for free. They do so by making awesome products but doing that takes money and resources. If you want them to continue to invest in making the worlds best IDEs, you should be cheering this decision. They charge a pittance for such products.
Seriously, for the price of IntelliJ ultimate, most programmers will earn that in 2-3 hours of work. Your paying 2-3 hours of your time for a product that saves you hundreds of hours, and helps you earn a high white collar salary.
I just don't get people who whine about the pricing of their tools. Have you looked at the costs of video production, 3d and 2d art programs? Profession music creation software? Or any enterprise software for godsakes?
JetBrains has fought hard to survive and thrive in a cut throat market where most people use free tools and don't want to buy anything. They make a premium product and sell it for less than a cheap smartphone you upgrade every 2 years.
Maybe they can please people who want the false comfort of ownership by boosting the price of the non-rent edition.
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 makes the best developer tools I've used, and while they offer free, community licenses, their more advanced tools still require a paid subscription.
Jetbrains as a company is wonderful, they treat their customers well and would be a joy to be their subscriber. The only issue is, I tried few times to use their products, they are good, but I prefer vim or visual studio code that are free and give me more. Thoughtworks use them as they empower their consultants with standard toolset. I paired with those guys and it is interesting what they get from the tools, but in the end, I am more comfortable with VS and Vim and command line. Increase font size for example is not simple :).
The whole idea that you can pay a company roughly $250/yr and they take care of your development tooling needs is wonderful. I wish things change and I would be happy to pay 3yrs in advance.
To clarify, I use javascript/typescript, ruby, elixir, sometimes elm, go etc. So no Java.
I think this entirely fair and from all the tools that I pay for , Jetbrains is the one that delivers the most value. Not to mention that their licensing model is very well made and you are not even forced to upgrade if you don't want to.
I do, however wish they would focus more on performance and code intellisense than constantly trying to add bells and whistles to their IDE. Don't give me more Github integrations, give me better code analysis, improve inspection with regards to common bugs and security vulnerabilities. Give me better code quality tools and suggest potential ways that I could write a certain code block to improve performance.. these are the features that are most useful for me and since IDEs can index and deeplink everything, they should be able to leverage that to better understand code context for analytics and reporting.
I pay for the full JetBrains subscription. While I still use vscode for typescript and rust, I use JetBrains for anything else. It's one of those no brainer purchases that pays for itself within a month.
Programmers create enormous value. If you can get even small single digit percentage improvements by leveraging better tooling, it pays for itself almost right away.
I estimate conservatively I produce $500,000 in value a year. If I can eke out a 1% improvement in productivity that's worth $5000 a year.
I think it's a big blind spot that developers don't invest enough in.
For a professional, jetbrains basically pays for itself within a day of starting to use it (in my opinion). I know a lot of people prefer VS code, but I frankly cannot imagine why.
Oh, I'm not at all against companies making a buck selling software. I'm a happy JetBrains customer for my IDE needs, and I'm not even a "professional" developer.
But why would they force the use of their "official" VS Code build for this? Couldn't they just charge for their "impressive" plugins, regardless of the edition of VS Code used? The JetBrains "community" IDEs (open source and gratis) can use paid plugins from their marketplace.
Jetbrains shows no signs of wanting to be a monopoly player in development tools. I've been a customer a long time, and I think they've done a great job of balancing making money with doing solid work and serving their customers. Microsoft, on the other hand, has a long history of willful domination and exploitation, and they've specifically done that with free products to kneecap competitors.
Jetbrains can make people pay for them because their products are just insanely good value for money. I currently get their whole suite for $15 a month, and I get to use them at work and for freelance assignments. I mean, it’s a no-brainer.
Yeah, but this is JetBrains. They are one of the few companies whose products are so much better than anyone else’s that I’d pay for them, even as an independent developer. They’ve been around for decades and are still more than popular enough that making money shouldn’t be their issue. My company of 80,000+ employees has a JetBrains license for every developer.
I’ve been very pleased with the quality of JetBrains products. My dev team has recently switched to VS Code and to get the same level of functionally we need several packages all in various states of maturity and the UX is no where close. It pays to pay JetBrains in terms of productivity.
I had thought that JetBrains products requires a licence, unlike VSCode which is free in regards to monetary cost.
However - the main gripe this community has with VSCode is that it is only partially open source. Microsoft adds extra bits to the code that is not open - mainly the items around telemetry. You can get around this with VSCodium or VSCode-OSS, but those are arguably forks and not a MS product.
If we need to compare value to price ratio using JetBrain's products, for example, $100 (discounted to $75) is a bit too much. I won't even compare to the free Atom, which thanks to plugins and architecture is turning quickly into a fully-featured IDE.
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.
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