When comparing NetBeans vs IntelliJ IDEA, the Slant community recommends IntelliJ IDEA for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript IDEs or editors?” IntelliJ IDEA is ranked 6th while NetBeans is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose IntelliJ IDEA is:
IDEA places an emphasis in safe refactoring, offering a [variety of features](https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/refactoring.html) to make this possible for a variety of languages. These features include safe delete, type migration and replacing method code duplicates.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Multiple revision control system integration
Has built-in support for the most popular revision control systems
Pro Frameworks support
Supports Symfony1, Symfony2,Yii2 & Zend frameworks.
Pro Free, open source, and cross-platform
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.
Pro PHPUnit support
PHPUnit is a testing framework. You can create test classes, run and see the code coverage directly from IDE interface.
Pro Composer commands inside IDE
The most used composer commands can be done directly from IDE.
Pro Best for PHP, HTML5 Apps Developemt
Pro FTP/SFTP synchronization
Supports synchronization with projects stored remotely through FTP or SFTP.
Pro Supports community plugins
NetBeans can be extended beyond the basic tool that you get out of the box through community made custom plugins.
Pro Accelerated HTML5 development support
Pro Less and Sass Compiler support
Pro Linux terminal inside IDE
You can run Linux terminal inside the IDE.
Pro Supports Twig templates
NetBeans provides code completion and documentation for all Twig elements.
Pro ApiGen and PHPDoc support
Supports documentation generation through ApiGen and PHPDoc.
Pro Powerful debugging and performance optimization
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.
Pro You can access source code history
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.
Pro PHPstan support
Supports static code analysis with phpstan
Pro ApiGen support
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.
Pro Bower support
Pro Supports Smarty
Supports Smarty Template Engine right out of the box.
Pro JMeter benchmarking tool support

Pro Smart refactorings
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.
Pro Fast and smart contextual assistance
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.
Pro Android support, JavaEE support, etc
A very complete development environment support.
Pro Lots of plugins
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.
Pro Stable and robust
IntelliJ IDEA hardly ever crashes or has any issues that plague other Java IDEs like file corruption or slowness.
Pro Intuitive and slick UI
IDEA has a clean, intuitive interface with some customization available (such as the Darcula theme).
Pro Support for many languages
IntelliJ supports many languages besides Java, some of these are: golang, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, Bash, etc.
Pro Clear and detailed documentation
The documentation is exhaustive, easy to navigate, and clearly worded.
Pro Many convenient features
These simplify the daily work, e.g. copy/cut a whole line without the need to select it.
Pro Free version available
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.
Pro Very powerful debugger
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.
Pro Gradle support
Pro Buit-in Git support
Pro Embedded database support
Creating an embedded database, running SQL script in a dedicated terminal, viewing tables and their contents, and creating a connection to an in-memory or embedded database is fully supported
Cons
Con Slows down occasionally
The Netbeans IDE is known to take a large memory as compared to other lighter IDE's available on the market. Slowdowns can decrease productivity and cause frustration.
Con Multilanguaje code completion fails
I example, sometimes code completion won't help you with html marks (or scripts) inside php echo (or print) sentences, and vice-versa.
Con Default website code format is too strict
Sometimes you need to write allowed code that IDE hasn't spected, and it will annoy you filling all your code with suggestions.
Con Development has stalled dramatically
It went down from two releases a year with minor bug-fix releases to one release and no fixes. There seem to be fewer features added per release as well. There is no activity in the plugin community.
Con Tries to do everything for you and gets it wrong too many times
Con Linux version lacks HDPI support
Con Somewhat expensive
IntelliJ IDEA is fairly expensive, with a pricetag of $149/year.
However there is a free community edition available.
Con Slow startup
Startup can be slow deepending on system configuration
Con Uses a lot of RAM
Con Standard hotkeys behave differently
Seems like hotkeys assignment in Idea has no logical consistency.
Like «F3» is usually next match, «Ctrl+W» - close tab, etc — they map to some different action by default.
There is a good effort in making the IDE friendly for immigrants from other products: there are options to use hotkeys from Eclipse, and even emacs. But these mappings are very incomplete. And help pages do not take this remapping into account, rather mentioning the standard hotkeys.
So, people coming from other IDEs/editors are doomed to using mouse and context menus (which are rather big and complex).
Con Bugs are not solved as often as they should
They are more interested in adding new features or issuing new versions than solving bugs.
Con Cannot open multiple projects in the same window
Con Built with closed source components
The version with full features is not opensource. Parts of the code are under apache licence though.
Con Lack of plugins
IntelliJ supports a very small amount of plugins. Although these are 'quality approved', many features are missing and can't be implemented because of that.
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