When comparing phpDesigner vs Codelobster, the Slant community recommends phpDesigner for most people. In the question“What are the best IDEs or editors for PHP?” phpDesigner is ranked 16th while Codelobster is ranked 24th. The most important reason people chose phpDesigner is:
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.
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Pros
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
Pro Advanced support for all popular frameworks
Including Laravel, Bootstrap. jQuery, WordPress, Drupal, Yii and so on.
Pro Special support for JQuery through the jQuery plugin
The jQuery support (when you install the jQuery plugin) is great. It adds function definitions so that autocomplete works as intended. Furthermore, the IDE knows about the logic of the different libraries and frameworks and can understand that $(this)
refers to a jQuery instance.
Pro Great HTML, CSS and JavaScript autocomplete
Codelobster has great HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP autocomplete
Pro Free version available
There is a free version available for download; it comes with a lot of features that you would find in an IDE.
Pro Portable option available
Codelobster IDE offers a lightweight, portable option.
Pro Hovering over a CSS property shows you which browsers are supported by that property
This is a really nice feature as it immediately shows you the browsers that support a certain CSS property. Of course, it does not beat actual testing, but it's still a nice feature that saves developers a lot of time.
Cons
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.
Con You need to sign up to get a free serial number for the free version
In order to use the free version of Codelobster, you have to sign up and get a free account. This is done to help stopping piracy, but it's still pretty jarring when all you want to do is install a program.
Con Expensive
For the Pro version (which includes all the available plug-ins), the cost is $99.95. The lite version (without plugins) is $39.95.