Brackets vs Intellij IDEA

Brackets will automatically refresh the browser and load the latest saved version of a file open in the browser. This works with php as well. Editing a css will even highlight the tag that's currently being worked on. However, it only works with Chrome.

Brackets is easy on memory usage and it starts up quickly.

Brackets is entirely free and open source.

The functionality of Brackets can be extended via a simple-to-use extension manager. The extension manager also has a considerable number of extensions and themes.

A feature called "Quick Edit" allows the user to select a tag in (a html file, for example) and edit the associated style without switching over to the css document. It also supports SASS and LESS pre-processors.

Brackets is being actively maintained and developed.

Hovering over colors hex codes or image paths will pop up previews of corresponding colors and images.

Brackets supports drag and drop of text, as well as multi / rectangular selection.

The editor is built using html, css, and javascript, making it extendable by any front-end developer.

You can have your cursor independently on multiple lines and so creating templates and/or editing multiple things at once is really fast and easy.

Vim-style editing is already built in the text editor.

A default extension allows for the extraction of PSD resources, such as images and styles. There's good integration for placing extracted resources into source.

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.

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.

IDEA has a clean, intuitive interface with some customization available (such as the Darcula theme).

IntelliJ IDEA hardly ever crashes or has any issues that plague other Java IDEs like file corruption or slowness.

IntelliJ supports many languages besides Java, some of these are: golang, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Bash, etc...

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.

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.

A very complete development environment support.

The documentation is exhaustive, easy to navigate, and clearly worded.

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.

These simplify the daily work, e.g. copy/cut a whole line without the need to select it.