IntelliJ IDEA vs Eclipse: Honest Comparison (2026)

The Java IDE market isn't a competition anymore. IntelliJ IDEA has 84% adoption among Java developers (JRebel 2025 report). Eclipse dropped to 28%. VS Code quietly took second place at 31%. Those numbers tell a story, but they don't tell the whole story.

Eclipse is still the right call for some teams. IntelliJ's free version (since the 2025.3 unification) is genuinely capable. And the gap between "most popular" and "best for your situation" is wider than market share suggests.

Head-to-head comparison

Pricing breakdown

IntelliJ IDEA

Since 2025.3, IntelliJ ships as a single product. The free version includes everything from the old Community Edition plus new additions: Spring syntax highlighting, database connections, SQL support, and a schema viewer.

Free: Full Java/Kotlin development, refactoring, debugger, Git, Maven/Gradle. Commercial use allowed.

Ultimate: €199/year personal (€159 year 2, €119 year 3+), €719/year commercial. Adds deep Spring/Jakarta EE support, full web development (JS/TS/HTML/CSS), Python, Ruby, PHP, Docker/Kubernetes, database tools, and profiler.

AI add-on: Free tier included. Pro at €100/year personal, Ultimate at €300/year. Multi-agent support (Junie, Claude Agent, GPT-5).

All Products Pack: €289/year personal — includes every JetBrains IDE plus AI Pro. Often cheaper than IntelliJ Ultimate alone if you use multiple tools.

Students and open-source maintainers get free licenses. 30-day trial for Ultimate.

Eclipse

Free. Always has been. Licensed under EPL 2.0, maintained by the Eclipse Foundation (non-profit). No tiers, no feature gates, no upsells.

The real cost is time. Eclipse requires more setup, more plugins, more configuration to reach the same functionality IntelliJ provides out of the box. For enterprise teams, the hours configuring Eclipse often exceed what they'd pay for IntelliJ licenses.

Where IntelliJ wins

Code intelligence. IntelliJ analyzes your entire project semantically. It knows your @Autowired service will be injected by Spring, that your Hibernate entity maps to a specific table, that your REST endpoint accepts a particular request body. Eclipse's JDT handles standard Java well, but framework-aware intelligence requires plugins that don't integrate as deeply.

Refactoring. 66+ refactoring types vs Eclipse's ~30. Better edge case handling — renaming across modules, refactoring within lambdas.

Debugging. IntelliJ's debugger is the best in any Java IDE: smart step-into, stream debugger (visualize Stream pipelines step by step), memory view, force return, data renderers. Eclipse covers the essentials but handles roughly 80% of scenarios vs IntelliJ's 95%.

Git integration. Visual diff, interactive rebase, drag-and-drop, three-pane merge. Eclipse's EGit works for basics, but most experienced users fall back to command-line Git for complex operations.

Language breadth. Ultimate bundles WebStorm, PyCharm, PhpStorm, GoLand, and RubyMine functionality. One IDE for Java backend + JavaScript frontend + database queries.

Where Eclipse wins

Price. Zero. For teams with absolutely no IDE budget, Eclipse provides professional Java development at no cost. IntelliJ Ultimate for a 10-person team at €719/year each is €7,190/year.

Constrained hardware. On machines with 8 GB RAM, Eclipse feels more responsive day-to-day. IntelliJ on 8 GB with a large project can be painful.

C/C++ development. Eclipse CDT is a mature, well-supported C/C++ IDE. IntelliJ doesn't support C/C++ at all (CLion is a separate product). If you need Java and C/C++ in one tool, Eclipse is the only option.

Legacy projects. Teams that have used Eclipse for years have configurations, custom plugins, and workflows built around it. Migrating a 15-year-old Eclipse-based build system to IntelliJ is a project, not a task.

Honest limitations

IntelliJ's problems

Performance regressions are chronic. Every major 2025.x release introduced new lag. The AI Assistant plugin caused 10-15 second delays on basic operations like copy-paste. JetBrains fixed 800+ bugs in 2025.3, but the pattern is concerning. Some teams deliberately stay on older versions.

The unified distribution feels like an upsell. The free version shows Ultimate-only features with lock icons everywhere. It feels less like a standalone product and more like a trial.

Resource hungry. 16 GB RAM recommended, 32 GB for monorepos. Initial project indexing can take minutes and spike to 2-3 GB RAM.

Eclipse's problems

The UI feels dated. Stuck somewhere around 2015. The dark theme is poor. Window management with perspectives is confusing. Modern developers expect cleaner.

Kotlin support is essentially dead. The Eclipse Kotlin plugin is barely maintained. If your team uses any Kotlin, Eclipse is not viable.

Plugin conflicts. Installing Spring Tools 4 alongside Gradle integration shouldn't break your IDE — but sometimes it does.

Corporate backing is declining. IBM reduced its investment. The project relies on 82 committers (down from much higher numbers). The 11-point market share drop in a single year is the steepest in Eclipse's history.

Alternatives worth considering

VS Code (free). 31% Java adoption and rising. The Extension Pack for Java (Microsoft + Red Hat) provides solid language support, debugging, and Maven/Gradle integration. Not a full IDE — refactoring is less sophisticated, no profiler, no enterprise tooling. But it starts in 2-3 seconds, uses ~300 MB RAM, and 68% of IntelliJ users already use it as a secondary tool.

Apache NetBeans (free). Version 29. The simplest "just works" Java IDE — open a Maven project and start coding. Good for beginners and small projects. But memory consumption is excessive and the plugin ecosystem is small.

Android Studio (free). Built on IntelliJ Community. The only real option for Android development with dedicated tooling (Layout Inspector, Compose Preview, Gemini AI). Needs 16-32 GB RAM.

Market share trend

Source: JRebel Java Developer Productivity Report. Respondents could select multiple IDEs.

Who should choose what

Use IntelliJ (free) if: You do Java or Kotlin development, you're a student, or you want IntelliJ's code intelligence without paying. The free version post-unification covers most individual developer needs.

Use IntelliJ Ultimate if: You work with Spring Boot, Jakarta EE, or Micronaut professionally. You do full-stack (Java + JS/TS). Your company can expense €719/year. At a loaded developer cost of €100K+/year, IntelliJ needs to save 3 hours annually to pay for itself.

Use Eclipse if: Budget is zero and you need enterprise Java features. You work on legacy Eclipse projects. You need C/C++ alongside Java. Your machine has 8 GB RAM or less.

Use VS Code if: You work across multiple languages and want one lightweight tool. You're on smaller Java projects. You want it as a secondary editor alongside IntelliJ.

FAQ

Is Eclipse dying?

Shrinking, not dying. It lost 11 points of market share in one year, the contributor count is down, and IBM's reduced investment is concerning. Eclipse will exist for years — too much enterprise software depends on it. But recommending it to new Java developers in 2026 feels like recommending Subversion for version control.

Is IntelliJ Community (free) good enough?

For pure Java and Kotlin work, yes. The 2025.3 unification added Spring syntax highlighting, database connections, and SQL support. You'll miss Ultimate's deep Spring framework navigation, web development tools, and Docker integration — but many developers work happily on the free version.

Should I learn Eclipse because companies use it?

Fewer each year. IntelliJ at 84% adoption means most companies use it. Learning Eclipse specifically for employability is not a good investment in 2026. Learn IntelliJ or VS Code instead.

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