When comparing JetBrains Rider vs IntelliJ IDEA, the Slant community recommends IntelliJ IDEA for most people. In the question“What are the best IDEs?” IntelliJ IDEA is ranked 2nd while JetBrains Rider is ranked 10th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro New C# IDE based on ReSharper and the IntelliJ platform
ReSharper is a popular Visual Studio Extension for .NET Developers. IntelliJ IDEA is a popular and fully featured JAVA IDE.
Pro Superior "quality of life" features
Extremely good at filling in all the mindless boilerplate type code while you stay productive.
Pro Fast performant
Rider has everything you want from a serious IDE, but without the bloat. This results in significantly fast performance in day to day operations.
Pro Multiple runtime support
Project Rider supports the .NET Framework and Mono, with CoreCLR support in the works. It also includes templates for creating new projects, and when you create an empty project, it's literally empty
Pro Cross-platform
As well as running and debugging multiple runtimes, Project Rider itself runs on multiple platforms. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Pro Decompile code for any .net library
Pro Version control integration
Intellij plugins for Git, Mercurial, and TFS plus Local History of files.
Pro Supports all the development lifecycle
Project Rider can build MSBuild and XBuild solutions as well as DNX/.NET CLI projects, and allows debugging .NET and Mono applications. DNX/.NET CLI debugging and CoreCLR support are coming.
Pro Excellent UI, Features beyond Visual Studio (File Layout just one example)
Pro Free for Students
With a university email, Rider can be obtained for free.
Pro Great Java Support
Pro A good editor for test-driven development
IntelliJ IDEA is really easy to work with when it comes to test-driven development in Java and JavaScript/TypeScript.
Pro Great JavaScript support
Pro Markdown support with preview
Pro Supports PHP quite well
Pro Great TypeScript support
Really good support for importing classes, libraries, etc. into a typescript class. Making it easy to do TDD.
Pro Good BASH script support
Pro Angular CLI support
Pro Made by developers for developers
It can make one more efficient, but also can get one way too used to shortcuts, autocomplete, and easy debugging.
Cons
Con Not free
Project Rider has a trial version available, but is not free.
Con No support for dotTrace, dotMemory yet on macOS
Support is promised on macOS, but currently only available on Windows. This means it’s not ideally suited for performance tracing and debugging.
Con Is RAM hungry
This product can hang a huge amount of RAM memory, up to 4 GB.
Con Relatively young project
Some bugs are to be expected since it's still a relatively young project.
Con Abnormal key maps
Though Visual Studio Key Map can be installed, it is still hard to find where the plugins are installed when one uses it to open a solution for the first time.
Con Is not free
But it does have a free version (Community Edition).
Con Heavy
Consumes more resources than VSCode etc. But depending on your use-case, it can still be worth it for the benefits you get with this editor.
Con Autocomplete does not work while IntelliJ is indexing
But this, in general, is not much of an issue. Usually after npm install, etc.