When comparing Floobits vs Nitrous, the Slant community recommends Floobits for most people. In the question“What are the best editors for remote pair programming?” Floobits is ranked 1st while Nitrous is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Floobits is:
Floobits doesn't force a new text editor, it integrates with existing text editors such as Emacs, Vim and Sublime Text.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Integrates with your text editors
Floobits doesn't force a new text editor, it integrates with existing text editors such as Emacs, Vim and Sublime Text.
Pro Video conferencing support
Floobits integrates with Google Hangouts to provide voice and video chat.
Pro Share terminal
Pro No editor
You can sync a Floobits workspace without a editor using a command line tool.
Pro Desktop application
Nitrous Desktop syncs files so you can edit them with your preferred text editor and offers box management from the app.
Pro GitHub Integration
Integrates with GitHub and allows for SSH keys for secure transfer. Additionally, allows logging in with yout GitHub account.
Pro Customizable Development Environment
Pro Slick UI
The interface is well designed and powerful.
Pro World Accessible URLs - Preview Your Application
Since you are using a linux box on the internet you are able to expose your apps to the world out of the box.
No messing around with firewalls or NAT. It Just Works.
This is most useful when needing to demonstrate or work on a task with other people who are not on the same LAN as you.
Pro Framework setup is painless
Installing a new Framework for programming, setting up the dev env, could turn into a nightmare, With Nitrous just create an account and jump to the write code, no setup pain at all, specially if you are in windows.
Pro Upgradeability
There are ways of upgrading your box that don't involve spending money such as social outreach and referrals.
Pro Allows you to edit locally with provided Atom plugin
Nitrous.io recently developed (in open beta) a plugin for Atom called Nitrogen which allows you to work locally within Atom, utilizing all of the features and plugins you enjoy in Atom, as well as having the sync capabilities of their original desktop sync app.
In short, it's brought the power of Atom and it's extensive plugin community to Nitrous's ability to provision and maintain development/production environments all in one package.
Pro Heroku, Azure, Nodejitsu integration
Pro Collaboration features
Pro Live online support
You can get live support and fairly quickly. If they cannot get to you fast enough you can leave a message and they get back to you within 24 hours via email or chat.
Pro Erlang support
You can get erlang up and running easily.
Cons
Con Limited number of supported editors
Floobits only supports a subset of IDEs and editors available. If you or the people you intend to work with don't use the supported editors, someone needs to switch their preferred environment to use the service.
Con Very pricey
Very pricey if you wish to use it for your regular cloud IDE and work on more than 5 projects.
Con Service shut down November 14, 2016
Con Old free account options available beyond 1st July 2015
The old free account will only available until 1st July 2015 and going to be replaced with new ones.