When comparing Aptana Studio vs Eclipse, the Slant community recommends Eclipse for most people. In the question“What are the best IDEs for web development?” Eclipse is ranked 16th while Aptana Studio is ranked 20th. The most important reason people chose Eclipse is:
Eclipse is an open source project and free to use.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Available in standalone and Eclipse plugin versions
Aptana Studio has standalone (130.7 MB for Windows) and Eclipse-plugin versions.
Pro HTML5-aware code assist
Aptana's code assist displays which tags are supported by which browsers.
Pro Support for web projects
Aptana was specifically created for web application development. It supports a variety of languages such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby.
Pro Built-in terminal
Has a built-in terminal emulator from which you can run commands.
Pro Free and open source
Aptana is available for free under the GPL license with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Git integration
Aptana provides integrated support for Git to make collaboration and version control easier.
Pro Free and open source
Eclipse is an open source project and free to use.
Pro Multiple languages - one IDE
Pro Large selection of plugins
Eclipse has a large and active community, which has resulted in a wide variety of plugins.
Pro Fast compiler
Eclipse uses a custom compiler (which can also be used outside of Eclipse), which is often faster than the normal Java Compiler, especially for incremental compilation.
Pro Easy to use and get started with
It's interface is super easy to use, after adding required package for your task everything just works.
Pro Gives good perspectives on your project
The concept of perspectives is outstanding. It puts right tools at your fingertips, keeping the tools you currently don't need out from the workbench. For example, in VCS perspective it's all about versions and branches. In debug perspective it's all about state.
In java ee project it can show http endpoints in a very accessible manner.
Pro Highly customizable
Thanks to the large variety of plugins and various configuration options, Eclipse is very customizable.
Pro Great debugger
Shows threads, concurrency locks, and conditional breakpoints.
Pro Good font rendering
Because Eclipse is based on SWT, it uses the native font rendering and thus looks better than other IDEs on some Linux systems, where the Java font rendering is not optimal.
Pro Good refactoring tools
Pro Faster than any other Java IDE
Fast, suitable for big projects, customizable, supports UML, many programming languages, plugins, and widgets vs NetBeans and JDeveloper. Support for Workspaces and Perspectives. Long term tested, free of charge, vs IntelliJ IDEA.
Pro Great in-UI documentation
Pro Dark theme improved!
Cons
Con Many dependencies
Aptana has a couple of dependencies to keep in mind.
It is built with Java and and has some requirements for the JDK version.
Aptana requires Git, and Eclipse 3.5+ if you are installing it as an Eclipse plugin.
Con No longer updated
Language support is increasingly dated.
Con Branding & online website is super cluttered
There are lots of official home pages for this IDE, the packages, and the repos - hard to find correct one. Also, the main name in IDE: "Eclipse", is same as "Eclipse Foundation" which makes things more confusing.
Con UI can be confusing
There's an overly abundant presence of menus, this forces you to constantly click around the different menu structures; foreign ideas, like Views and Perspectives; strange menu choices, like configure settings located in Windows menu->Preferences.
Con Lack of plugins with good user interfaces
Many Eclipse plugins are extremely confusing, with UIs that are even less consistent than Eclipse itself.
Con Plugins can be unstable
Though there are plenty of plugins to choose from, they aren't always reliable. Some aren't maintained, bug fixes can be slow, and you may need to download plugins from multiple sources.
Con Tends to be slow and lags a lot
Con Poor language support via plugins
Eclipse supports other languages with a huge amount of plugins. Many languages have their own distribution, but multi-language is hard to exist in one project. Like Scala, there is no official support from Eclipse for this language. If Eclipse gets an update, languages such as these will not.
Con Newer versions are getting less stable
Eclipse 4 Neon randomly hangs. For example, during installing new software.
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=513218
Con Some old bugs don't get fixed
E.g. change a parameter name to the same as a field - the field will not be prefixed with "this." like in IDEA.