An Honest Comparison of VS Code vs. JetBrains – 5 Points
VS Code has come a long way and Is overtaking JetBrains by innovation speed it seems, largely thanks to its rich plugin ecosystem. However, I think it is not quite there yet, largely due to bugs which need to be ironed out.<p>My observations from daily driving VS Code insiders for half a year:<p>- stuff breaks and will not work for multiple weeks. this is especially frustrating if you use setups which are considered “exotic” by the devs (like having IPv6 disabled). But that is Insiders for you.<p>- Remote dev support is a lit better than JetBrains (also it is not in the free editions of JetBrains)<p>- UI customizability is miles ahead in JetBrains. Just an example: there has been a Ticket open in VS Code to enable moving the outline view to the right side of the UI for years and they say it is not possible because that would need some large refactor.<p>- JB Debugger is more convenient and easier to use<p>- Tests and TDD work better out of the box in JB. No finicky manual switching between test output and Debut Console needed like in VS Code.<p>- VS Code language servers seem to be quicker in building index. I had Pycharm
Stuck in a seemingly infinite Index Rebuild multiple times.<p>- setting up languages and projects in Vs Code can be exhausting and seemingly impossible sometimes (Monorepo…)<p>- finally: refactor methods are wayyyy ahead in JetBrains products. Since VS Code depends on open source implementations by plug-in maintainers&#x2F;language servers for these, they tend to vary a lot from language to language.<p>I could go on and on. But my general feeling is that VS Code is more flexible and has more features at the cost of a worse UX, largely due to its open source nature. JetBrains has a way better UX and is more solid (hello enterprises!) and will eventually catch up to some of the more Revolutionary new VS Code features, but it has a lot slower update cycle.<p>If you want to get work done and your use case fits into a JB product, use it. If you want one application that can do everything under the sun, get VS Code.