When comparing IntelliJ IDEA vs Beyond Compare, the Slant community recommends Beyond Compare for most people. In the question“What are the best diff tools for Git?” Beyond Compare is ranked 3rd while IntelliJ IDEA is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Beyond Compare is:
Beyond Compare can be used to compare both files and folders. File-Filters possible.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Smart refactorings
IDEA places an emphasis in safe refactoring, offering a variety of features to make this possible for a variety of languages.
These features include safe delete, type migration and replacing method code duplicates.
Pro Fast and smart contextual assistance
Uses a fast indexing technique to provide contextual hints (auto-completion, available object members, import suggestions).
On-the-fly code analysis to detect errors and propose refactorization.
Pro Android support, JavaEE support, etc
A very complete development environment support.
Pro Support for many languages
IntelliJ supports many languages besides Java, some of these are: golang, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Bash, etc.
Pro Lots of plugins
Many plugins are available for almost any task a developer may need to cover. Plugins are developed by Jetbrains themselves or by 3rd parties through the SDK available for writing them.
Pro Stable and robust
IntelliJ IDEA hardly ever crashes or has any issues that plague other Java IDEs like file corruption or slowness.
Pro Intuitive and slick UI
IDEA has a clean, intuitive interface with some customization available (such as the Darcula theme).
Pro Clear and detailed documentation
The documentation is exhaustive, easy to navigate, and clearly worded.
Pro Very powerful debugger
With ability to step into a certain part of a large method invocation (Shift+F7), drop frame, executing code snippets, showing method return values, etc.
Pro Free version available
There is a free community edition (open source) and an ultimate edition, which you can compare here.
The ultimate edition is available for free for one year for students but must be registered through an .edu e-mail account.
Pro Many convenient features
These simplify the daily work, e.g. copy/cut a whole line without the need to select it.
Pro Gradle support
Pro Built-in Git support
Pro Student Benefits
Verify yourselves as a student to get more perks.
Pro Embedded database support
Creating an embedded database, running SQL script in a dedicated terminal, viewing tables and their contents, and creating a connection to an in-memory or embedded database is fully supported.
Pro Prices are not bad
I pay $24 a month and i have access to all jetbrain peoducts , so i use their many tools , i tried many others like netbeans , eclipse , etc , they re good but intelij is on the space and the sky is the limit . Been using it for 5 years and i cant tell i got frustrated using .it
Pro Supports comparing folders
Beyond Compare can be used to compare both files and folders. File-Filters possible.
Pro Supports 3 way merge
Good overview. Clear display of changed lines (background color) and changed characters (foreground color).
Pro Supports editing files directly
Pro Has rules for adding ignore-masks and replacement rules
So parts you don't want to see in your comparision can be hidden with ignore masks. Parts that are okay to be changed can be set with change-lists so beyond compare knows what's the replacement value and skips displaying this. So you can focus on the for you important changes. For example with the ignore mask I was able to compare two logs with different timestamps but nearly same content. (beginning with timestams the first x characters adding to ignore)
Pro Synchronize folders
Can be used to synchronize folders. Including wildcards.
Pro Works well with large files
Pro Can be used to compare image files
This is a useful feature for game developers using Git.
Pro Opens popular archive formats as directories
Compare archive to directory or to another archive, update ZIP archives by copying files from other side or by editing them directly in compare view.
Pro Can compare remote directories
Beyond Compare can compare directories through FTP, SFTP. Also it can compare directories hosted on Dropbox or Amazon S3.
Pro One license covers all major OSs (Linux/Windows/Mac)
Pro Customer Service is awesome and easy to work with
Pro Has Registry compare
You can compare Registry vs Registry or Registry vs .REG file, both local and remote. You can copy values and keys between sides or edit them.
Pro Has file conversion/preprocessing feature
You can run a script or executable based on file extension before showing a file. Great for beautifying XML, extracting text from MS Office documents, running dis-asm etc.
Cons
Con Slow startup
Startup can be slow depending on system configuration.
Con Uses a lot of RAM
Con Somewhat expensive
IntelliJ IDEA is fairly expensive, with a pricetag of $149/year.
However there is a free community edition available.
Con Built with closed source components
The version with full features is not opensource. Parts of the code are under apache licence though.
Con Cannot open multiple projects in the same window
Con Lack of plugins
IntelliJ supports a very small amount of plugins. Although these are 'quality approved', many features are missing and can't be implemented because of that.
Con Bugs are not solved as often as they should
They are more interested in adding new features or issuing new versions than solving bugs.
Con Standard hotkeys behave differently
Seems like hotkeys assignment in Idea has no logical consistency.
Like «F3» is usually next match, «Ctrl+W» - close tab, etc — they map to some different action by default.
There is a good effort in making the IDE friendly for immigrants from other products: there are options to use hotkeys from Eclipse, and even emacs. But these mappings are very incomplete. And help pages do not take this remapping into account, rather mentioning the standard hotkeys.
So, people coming from other IDEs/editors are doomed to using mouse and context menus (which are rather big and complex).
Con No dark mode
Lack dark mode.
Con No touch support
This is important for scrolling
Con Paid proprietary software
Beyond Compare is not free. It offers different license options depending on the number of members in a team and depending on the software version.