When comparing pgAdmin 4 vs DataGrip, the Slant community recommends DataGrip for most people. In the question“What are the best GUI tools for PostgreSQL on Windows?” DataGrip is ranked 2nd while pgAdmin 4 is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose DataGrip is:
DataGrip is not a language-specific IDE. It supports a wide variety of languages by default, such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Derby, H2, Sqlite, and many more. You can also specify your own JDBC drivers to get support for additional platforms.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Open source
pgAdmin is open source and actively contributed to.
Pro Dashboard displays useful overview of server activity
The dashboard tab includes server load visualizations and other useful details on database activity, such as connected sessions, database locks, and prepared transactions.
Pro Can be deployed on a server and accessed remotely from browser
As pgAdmin 4 is a web application, it can be easily deployed on any server and accessed remotely using any web browser.
Pro UI can be re-organized to user's liking
pgAdmin 4's user interface elements are detachable panels that can be dragged around and re-arranged to be displayed standalone or in the tabbed browser.
Pro Tabbed views to accomodate different screen/window sizes
The tabbed browser in pgAdmin 4 is excellent for accomodating different screen/window sizes. If you're on a small screen, the tabbed browser can save you screen estate by displaying the different panels in different tabs. If you're on a big screen, you can make full use of your screen estate by detaching the panels and moving it where you like.
Pro Portable version available
There is a portable version of pgAdmin available, pgAdminPortable that allows you to easily move your info between machines.
Pro Supports multiple languages
DataGrip is not a language-specific IDE. It supports a wide variety of languages by default, such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Derby, H2, Sqlite, and many more.
You can also specify your own JDBC drivers to get support for additional platforms.
Pro Much more powerful than its counterparts
DataGrip is a full-featured IDE for working with databases and SQL. It includes commonly found features in database clients, and offers IDE-specific features beyond that — version control, autocompletion, refactoring support, etc.
Pro Beautiful and customizable UI
DataGrip currently provides two theme options, light and dark. The UI is intuitive to navigate and provides powerful features such as a diagram view of table relationships.
Pro Helps you avoid mistakes
It can catch SQL bugs and suggest ways to resolve them. It will inform of unresolved objects and the use of keywords as identifiers.
Pro Refactoring support
You can refactor SQL code with DataGrip — it resolves all references automatically and when an object/variable is renamed, you can choose to update all references to it in your project.
Pro Powerful data editor
A powerful data editor lets you add, remove, edit, and clone data rows. Navigate through the data by foreign keys and use the text search to find anything in the data displayed in the table editor. All your changes are stored locally and can be submitted at once. Multiple fields can also be edited at once.
Pro Version control support
DataGrip supports a wide variety of VCS tools out of the box so that you can edit, test, and commit changes without ever leaving the tool.
Pro Excellent code completion
DataGrip's code completion is context-sensitive and schema-aware code completion. It will take into account tables structure, foreign keys, and even database objects created in your code.
Pro Cross-platform
Cons
Con Resource intensive
pgAdmin4 is a web application. The native binary is a wrapped version of the web app that runs a webserver and web browser, thus it has a high memory footprint and other possible impacts on system resources a native application wouldn't have.
Con UI is slow
The user interface is slow, especially when interacting with query results. While queries execute fast, the user interface can lag behind — selecting a row from a table, scrolling through data, and performing other UI operations can have some delays.
Con UI for Mac is very different from other Mac apps
The file navigation seems homegrown and is very hard to use. It resets you to the root directory every time you open a new file browser. Actively frustrating to use.
Con Bloated
900MB installed, and for an unintuitive, and feature-lacking software.
Con Lack of a schema - sql option
Con Not Intuitive
Dated and obtuse UI design.
Con Non-native UI
Many "normal" key bindings don't work like in other apps. Scrolling behavior is terrible.
Con Performance can be slow/sluggish when working with high-volume databases
As with all other IDEs, DataGrip is powerful and thus requires more resources than usual. It can use up to several GB's of memory when working with high-volume databases, and this has an impact on performance if your system is not equipped to handle it.
Con Not user friendly
For incompetent users that do not have any idea what they are doing this, and any similar product will not seem user friendly. For nearly everyone else this is yet another amazing IDE from the JetBrains family; a must have!
Con Expensive
This is an annual subscription with tiered pricing that diminishes a small amount year over year. But there are other much cheaper or free alternatives. This is the premium priced product of the bunch.
