Webstorm vs Vscode for learning - Which One Is Better?
There are lots of different editors and IDEs on the market. Which one is the best tool for programming? The two most popular choices are VSCode and WebStorm.
Many students ask me which is better to use — Visual Studio Code or IntelliJ IDEA, particularly WebStorm. To answer these questions, we must understand all the pros and cons of these two products. In this post, you will learn about the differences between VSCode and WebStorm for your everyday programming and which one is right for you.
Topics that are covered:
- The main difference
- Integrated Development Environment vs Editor
- How long have they existed?
- How many devs use it?
- Price comparison
- 2024 WebStorm price update
- Who is it better for?
- Language Server Protocol
- Safety
- Git functionality
- Performance
- Visual Studio Code problem
- Conclusion
The main difference
Let's start with the basics. VSCode is an editor, while WebStorm is a full IDE. What does this mean? An editor doesn’t have advanced features like refactoring, auto import dependencies, code analysis, and more. It focuses primarily on writing code and providing syntax highlighting.
An IDE (Integrated Development Environment), on the other hand, is a full-blown tool designed to provide the best possible experience for the developer. So, an IDE must be better, right?
Integrated Development Environment vs Editor
All these differences are true, but nowadays editors are gaining some features of IDEs. They are still not on the same level, but they keep getting more and more features from IDEs.
This leads to the first problem I see with VSCode. It is a code editor, but as developers want more and more features, it becomes more IDE-like, becoming slower over time and ceasing to be just an editor.
It’s not even really an editor anymore; it’s a mix of an editor and an IDE.
A true editor would be Sublime Text, which was popular long ago. It doesn’t offer anything except syntax highlighting for most programming languages and a file tree. VSCode has far more features built-in.
WebStorm is one of the IDEs in the JetBrains family, all of which share the same base, IntelliJ IDEA. It is certainly the most popular IDE in the world.
How long have they existed?
Visual Studio Code was released 8 years ago, while JetBrains released WebStorm 23 years ago. This is a huge time difference in development. You can't even compare the amount of features that can be implemented in an additional 15 years. If we consider the amount of time for development, the number of features, or how polished the product is, WebStorm obviously wins here. JetBrains products simply had more time to be refined. Still, VSCode is not a new tool. It has existed long enough to polish visible problems, optimize performance, and improve it.
How many devs use it?
VSCode is for sure the most popular editor in the world, and according to the 2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 73.71% of 86,544 respondents are using it to write code. It is especially popular for web development and front-end development.
JetBrains claims that 15.9 million developers already use their product. These numbers are difficult to compare, but both of them are significant.
Price comparison
But here is the biggest difference between these two products. The price is exactly why 99% of beginners choose VSCode. VSCode is completely free and can be used on any platform. On the other hand, WebStorm is a paid, subscription-based product.
The current monthly price is $8.21. While this is not an extremely high price, in comparison to a completely free product, VSCode obviously wins.
If you don’t want to spend any money on your editor and you want something free, then VSCode is a no-brainer.
2024 Webstorm price update
This is how it was previously. But on the 10th of October 2024, JetBrains released a blog post stating that WebStorm IDE is now completely free for non-commercial use.
This means that if you use WebStorm for learning, open-source project development, content creation, or hobby development, you can now do it absolutely for free.
For commercial usage, nothing has changed. You still need a WebStorm license to use it.
Who is it better for?
WebStorm vs VSCode for learning, which one is better? From my point of view, VSCode is great for beginners. You can simply start writing code without needing a lot of features from your editor, and VSCode covers all these needs.
WebStorm is more suitable for a professional developer. Why is that? It indexes the project.
Indexing examines your project to create a virtual map of classes, objects, and other code elements that make up your application. This is important for providing coding assistant functionality, search, and instant navigation. After this, all actions are performed really fast.
This makes a huge difference. As a full-blown IDE, WebStorm indexes all files, classes, and methods in your projects, using this information to bring you the best possible autocomplete, replacement, search, and refactoring tools. WebStorm knows what is going on in your project, all the time.
But the indexing feature can be irritating. You are in the middle of coding something and typing really fast, but for some reason, your IDE becomes completely unresponsive for the next 30 seconds to a minute. It’s not the end of the world, but it can disturb your coding flow. Luckily, it doesn't happen often, and once the project is indexed, everything happens almost instantaneously.
Language Server Protocol
In Visual Studio Code, you don't have all this functionality. It is still an editor with some IDE features, but it is far behind WebStorm when it comes to refactoring. It can still provide imports and autocomplete functionality without indexing a project through LSP, but it is not really comparable to full indexing.
LSP is the Language Server Protocol between the language server and your editor. It means that instead of indexing a project or implementing autocomplete functionality inside the editor, all the heavy lifting is done by the language server, and the editor just renders errors or autocomplete functionality that the server provides to it. This is exactly how such features are done in VSCode, as it has built-in support for LSP.
But still, it is only a partial replacement for the indexing feature.
Safety
If you work on a huge project and need to move lots of files, change names, refactor something, or get help with debugging, it is much simpler to do it in WebStorm. Many advanced developers say that by using WebStorm, they really feel safe.
You break much less stuff with WebStorm simply because of how well it refactors the project.
You have functionality like Safe Delete, and when moving a file, you can be totally sure that all your imports are updated, so WebStorm doesn’t break your workflow.
VSCode, on the other hand, just has basic refactoring and debugging capabilities, like renaming through LSP and updating imports when moving files. Unfortunately, this is only the basics of refactoring compared to what WebStorm offers.
Git functionality
Git is something that you will use in every single project. There are no companies or teams that don't use a version control system, and Git is the most popular one. But working with Git is another thing that I don't like about VSCode. It is super limited and really basic. Yes, you can switch branches, make a commit, or push your changes. But that's basically it. Anything more than that looks unpolished or isn't possible to do at all with the default functionality. You need to install some extensions, and even then, they don't cover everything you need. Even something as simple as Git Blame is not there by default.
I’ve even seen that some VSCode packages for Git are paid. Yes, you heard that right. You use the free editor but pay for the extension. This doesn't make sense.
In comparison, the Git functionality in WebStorm is amazing. You can easily see blame, diff, and resolve conflicts in seconds via a 3-way merge. Git integration in WebStorm is done on a different level.
The Resolve Conflicts window is the best merge tool I have ever seen. Its UI is clean, and it is easy to understand what changes will be applied.
Performance
Another important comparison is performance. For years, people complained that WebStorm eats a lot of memory, especially when left open for a long period of time. If you need to make changes in multiple projects simultaneously, the memory usage will be doubled or tripled. Not every developer machine can handle that, especially when you already have a bunch of web servers and databases running.
It is much better now, as computers are more powerful and WebStorm is better optimized. For everyday work, I can't complain about the performance too much, but I still only have one project open at any time.
Additionally, you must understand that lots of plugins and tools are enabled in WebStorm by default. You can lower memory usage and improve performance by disabling things you don't need. Unfortunately, most developers don't try to improve that but just complain that performance is bad.
Visual Studio Code has better performance to start with, and you can certainly run several instances when you need to update multiple projects.
But this is not where VSCode wins. When you need to open a huge file or work with a large project, WebStorm manages it much better. Sometimes you can't even open the project with VSCode because it hangs due to the number of files, or it can hang when you open a huge file. So from a reliability perspective, VSCode still has places to optimize its performance.
Visual Studio Code problem
I still think that VSCode is going the wrong way as an editor. It started as a lightweight editor, and they continuously added more and more features to it. You just can't do that indefinitely without a performance impact. So it becomes slower and eats more memory over time.
I would really like if VSCode stays an editor and doesn't try to be an IDE. So many people use it because it is lightweight and you can start development in seconds without having too many tools. People don't use VSCode because they want an IDE, and I feel like transforming VSCode into an IDE is a wrong approach. But only time will tell if that is what people want.
Conclusion
As I already mentioned, WebStorm is really good for big production applications. If you're working on a small project, VSCode is much faster. Starting a small project and constantly indexing it just doesn't make sense. You don't need that level of functionality. If you don't have much to refactor, VSCode will work just fine for you.
You might have heard that WebStorm consumes a lot of RAM when used for long periods. This is a valid point—you may need to restart WebStorm occasionally. However, VSCode has another issue: it doesn't handle huge projects well. It can become too laggy, sometimes to the point where you can't work with the project at all.
To sum this up, both solutions are amazing. Previously, the answer was obvious—if you didn't want to spend money, VSCode was the way to go. Nowadays, as both tools are free, I recommend you try both of them to see which one you like more, according to your personal preferences. But for advanced developers working on big projects, I highly recommend using WebStorm. It is a much better solution for that. And if your company pays for WebStorm instead of you, it's a no-brainer as you'll be much more satisfied using WebStorm.
