When comparing Sublime Text with C Improved plugin vs CLion, the Slant community recommends CLion for most people. In the question“What are the best IDEs for C on Windows?” CLion is ranked 2nd while Sublime Text with C Improved plugin is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose CLion is:
CLion has an intelligent autocompletion engine that tries to predict the symbol you are typing based on your previous history and the context in which it's being typed.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Consistent cross-platform
Looks consistently the same across Windows, OS X and Linux.
Pro Fast
Sublime Text 2 is among the fastest editors as it is and Sublime Text 3 promises to improve the start-up time to become even faster.
Pro Powerful plugin system
Sublime Text supports a large number of languages and general text editing features out of the box, but its most useful feature is its extensibility - Sublime Text uses TextMate's syntax declaration files to support new languages, has all its menus and keybindings generated from JSON files, and can be scripted to add new features using Python.
Pro Intelligent code completion
CLion has an intelligent autocompletion engine that tries to predict the symbol you are typing based on your previous history and the context in which it's being typed.
Pro Cross platform
Clion works on Windows, Linux and OSX.
Cons
Con Proprietary
Con Few releases
Sublime Text 3 is in Beta since June 2013 but the latest Dev version of Sublime Text 3 was released in Februrary 2016.
Con Proprietary
Clion is proprietary software which costs $199/1st year for a business license or $89/1st year for an individual license.
Con Build Tool Integration is messy/over complicated
I have a Jetbrains annual subscription so I can use this tool for free and I've used the Java IDE for years so I really want to like CLion. But it's just over complex to add 3rd party libraries etc. Netbeans/Eclipse etc are much better integrated with the build tools