Geany vs NetBeans

Geany is very lightweight thanks to the smaller offering of features.

Geany has a built-in plugin manager which can be used to install plugins and add new powerful features to the editor.

In Geany you technically search once for a whole search query, unlike Gedit, where once you start typing, the file is searched for in accordance with each substring of what you're typing, all the while leading to terribly annoying lag.

Geany is a cross platform editor, very similar to Notepad++ in Windows.

Press F5 and code will run without the need to switch between windows.

This software respects your freedom.

Hence it is capable of showing the methods and inner classes of, e.g., a Java source file.

It is a real app and not another frankenstein web/electron app. This means it runs great and doesn't extraordinary amounts of RAM.

For example, there is an easy way to change the font and theme in the View menu. No need to search through several syntax styles like in Notepad++ just to be able to change the used font.

NetBeans is a free, GPL-licensed IDE. It can run on any computer with a Java virtual machine. If a computer has a Java virtual machine (JVM), Netbeans can run on it. Netbeans can, therefore, run on a variety of operating systems such as Windows, *nix, and Mac OS. Being open source means that developers can contribute changes to the code to have the IDE better serve them.

Has built-in support for the most popular revision control systems

Supports synchronization with projects stored remotely through FTP or SFTP.

You can run Linux terminal inside the IDE.

Supports Symfony1, Symfony2,Yii2 & Zend frameworks.

There's a built-in local history that lets you compare code changes and revert to a specific revision. Helpful when source code file accidentally overwritten.

PHPUnit is a testing framework. You can create test classes, run and see the code coverage directly from IDE interface.

Git commits/local diff comparison is best

NetBeans can be extended beyond the basic tool that you get out of the box through community made custom plugins.

The most used composer commands can be done directly from IDE.

Netbeans not only debugs your code, and points out errors but also gives you hints on which sections of your code could be further optimized.

Supports Smarty Template Engine right out of the box.

NetBeans provides code completion and documentation for all Twig elements.

Supports documentation generation through ApiGen and PHPDoc.

Supports static code analysis with phpstan

ApiGen allows automatically generating documentation from specifically formatted comments. It's easy to use, supports traits, allows fuzzy searching for classes and highlighting docblocks using Markdown.