When comparing Eclipse vs PyCharm Community Edition, the Slant community recommends Eclipse for most people. In the question“What are the best IDEs?” Eclipse is ranked 12th while PyCharm Community Edition is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Eclipse is:
Eclipse is an open source project and free to use.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and open source
Eclipse is an open source project and free to use.
Pro Multiple languages - one IDE
Pro Large selection of plugins
Eclipse has a large and active community, which has resulted in a wide variety of plugins.
Pro Fast compiler
Eclipse uses a custom compiler (which can also be used outside of Eclipse), which is often faster than the normal Java Compiler, especially for incremental compilation.
Pro Easy to use and get started with
It's interface is super easy to use, after adding required package for your task everything just works.
Pro Gives good perspectives on your project
The concept of perspectives is outstanding. It puts right tools at your fingertips, keeping the tools you currently don't need out from the workbench. For example, in VCS perspective it's all about versions and branches. In debug perspective it's all about state.
In java ee project it can show http endpoints in a very accessible manner.
Pro Highly customizable
Thanks to the large variety of plugins and various configuration options, Eclipse is very customizable.
Pro Great debugger
Shows threads, concurrency locks, and conditional breakpoints.
Pro Good font rendering
Because Eclipse is based on SWT, it uses the native font rendering and thus looks better than other IDEs on some Linux systems, where the Java font rendering is not optimal.
Pro Good refactoring tools
Pro Faster than any other Java IDE
Fast, suitable for big projects, customizable, supports UML, many programming languages, plugins, and widgets vs NetBeans and JDeveloper. Support for Workspaces and Perspectives. Long term tested, free of charge, vs IntelliJ IDEA.
Pro Great in-UI documentation
Pro Dark theme improved!
Pro Version control integration
PyCharm has CVS, Git, Subversion and Mercurial integration.
Pro Sophisticated autocompletion
PyCharm includes sophisticated heuristics for determining what each variable type is and providing autocompletion suggestions for them.
Pro Excellent refactoring support
There are many refactoring options including renaming and changing signature across entire projects. It also includes the an ability to preview changes before committing and exclude anything unwanted.
Pro Excellent debugger
PyCharm can leverage run-time information when running your application with the built-in debugger to figure out what types can possibly be passed to which functions, etc.
Pro Framework support
PyCharm supports cefpython and electron.js (with c bindings).
Pro Pro features Free for students
JetBrains offers a Student Pack, which gives you a student license and access to the pro features of selected products such as PyCharm, IntelliJ IDEA and Php Storm.
Cons
Con Branding & online website is super cluttered
There are lots of official home pages for this IDE, the packages, and the repos - hard to find correct one. Also, the main name in IDE: "Eclipse", is same as "Eclipse Foundation" which makes things more confusing.
Con UI can be confusing
There's an overly abundant presence of menus, this forces you to constantly click around the different menu structures; foreign ideas, like Views and Perspectives; strange menu choices, like configure settings located in Windows menu->Preferences.
Con Lack of plugins with good user interfaces
Many Eclipse plugins are extremely confusing, with UIs that are even less consistent than Eclipse itself.
Con Plugins can be unstable
Though there are plenty of plugins to choose from, they aren't always reliable. Some aren't maintained, bug fixes can be slow, and you may need to download plugins from multiple sources.
Con Tends to be slow and lags a lot
Con Poor language support via plugins
Eclipse supports other languages with a huge amount of plugins. Many languages have their own distribution, but multi-language is hard to exist in one project. Like Scala, there is no official support from Eclipse for this language. If Eclipse gets an update, languages such as these will not.
Con Newer versions are getting less stable
Eclipse 4 Neon randomly hangs. For example, during installing new software.
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=513218
Con Some old bugs don't get fixed
E.g. change a parameter name to the same as a field - the field will not be prefixed with "this." like in IDEA.
Con Memory-hungry
Can use a lot of memory (several GBs), especially when dealing with large projects.
Con Can sometimes become very slow, freeze, and become unresponsive
It becomes extremely frustrating when you have to wait for the text you've typed to appear in your editor. Furthermore, during these freezes the editor does not always queue what your're typing, so you might have to wait > 15 seconds before you can continue your editing. This quickly affects the concentration of a developer, causing flow interruption and general performance degradation.
Con Feature incomplete
Some features are locked behind a paywall. Although if you are a student, you can apply for the Student Pack.