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Add to SafariWhen comparing Eclipse PHP Development Tools vs phpDesigner, the Slant community recommends Eclipse PHP Development Tools for most people. In the question“What are the best IDEs or editors for PHP?” Eclipse PHP Development Tools is ranked 3rd while phpDesigner is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose Eclipse PHP Development Tools is:
Eclipse has a huge community developing plugins that can then be found on the [marketplace](http://marketplace.eclipse.org/).
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Access to a wide variety of Eclipse plugins
Eclipse has a huge community developing plugins that can then be found on the marketplace.
Pro Free, cross-platform
PDT is available for free on Windows, OSX and Linux.
Pro Modular architecture offers flexibility in setup
Since Eclipse is highly modular by design, relying heavily on plugins for functionality it can be set up so that it includes only the necessary functionality and nothing else.
Pro A plethora of configuration options
Each component of Eclipse can be configured separately offering fine grained control.
Pro Syntax highlighting
Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) has such good syntax highlighting for PHP, CSS, HTML.
Pro Syntax validation
You would not be regret for having PDT as you IDE choices for PHP Development. It will help you validate your PHP code without you worry it will be wrong.
Pro Remote Xdebug possible
If you are running your PHP in an Docker-Container you can easily connect Xdebug remotly with Eclipse.
Pro Live error checking
phpDesigner checks for errors as code is written showing the actual PHP error messges. Code does not need to be run to find missing braces or semicolons.
Pro Xdebug support
Xdebug is a PHP extension that adds debugging and profiling capabilities.
Pro Has a free 30-day trial
Pro PHP & JS frameworks support
Includes support for PHP frameworks such as Zend, CodeIgniter, Yii and Symfony and JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, ExtJS, Yui, Dojo. MooTools and Prototype.
Pro Git and SVN integration
Cons
Con Doesn't support blade files
Con You need big memory of RAM
You need at least 4GB Ram for get the fastest PDT if you plan to use it as your PHP tools.
Con Configuring Eclipse is time-consuming
Setting up Eclipse can be difficult. Each section and each plugin of Eclipse has its own preferences that together add up to lots of tweaking.
Con Not free
Not free!
Con SFTP support is somewhat lacking
Socket timeouts aren't handled well and sometimes result in an inability to save remote work.
Con Small development team
The development team consists of one person, Michael Pham, and further development relies solely on his continued interest in the project.
