Atom vs. PhpStorm

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Atom
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Atom is a free and open source text editor offering a range of packages and themes.N/A
PhpStorm
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
JetBrains supports PhpStorm, an integrated development environment (IDE).
$99
per year per user
Pricing
AtomPhpStorm
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
For Individuals
$99
per year per user
For Organizations
$249
per year per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AtomPhpStorm
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AtomPhpStorm
Best Alternatives
AtomPhpStorm
Small Businesses
BBEdit
BBEdit
Score 9.1 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Vim
Vim
Score 8.3 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Vim
Vim
Score 8.3 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AtomPhpStorm
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
9.3
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.6
(0 ratings)
9.4
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AtomPhpStorm
Likelihood to Recommend
Atom is great for developers looking for a completely hackable experience. There is a ton of plugins available to you, and you can really build an editor that matches your own personal taste. The performance is also pretty neat and does not impact your CPU as much as the competition.
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PhpStorm is well suited for any PHP development. It integrates well with Symfony, Laravel, CodeIgniter, Cake & Twig. I have used it very successfully in the past and despite not being my go-to editor, I will still use it when working on PHP heavy frameworks.
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Pros
  • Atom is highly customizable and allows for various themes and extensions that can make your code easier to read.
  • Atom has many code hinting features that allow users to write faster and integrate with services likeLINT that can clean up your code once your done to meet your internal teams style choices.
  • It's very fast and manages projects well - Accessing other files within a related folder(s) is very easy and intuitive.
  • It's free!
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  • Version Control: Git, Subversion, and Others.
  • Alerts about code being developed, alerts like errors, discontinuation of some function, suggestions for improvements.
  • Application database access can run SQL commands directly from PhpStorm without having to have any other clients open.
  • Shortcut keys that assist in the coding process.
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Cons
  • Due to some default settings, when I opened the file in Atom and commit it on Git it shows almost every line is changed so my PR is looking too big/ugly.
  • I think omitting the empty spaces should not be the default setting.
  • Performance needs some attention.
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  • There is a bug sometimes, when you pull that the directory structure it forgets all the folders
  • It's not free
  • When I copy paste the default is to not keep the same spacing/tab pattern of the original, which I'm not a fan of
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Likelihood to Renew
Well Atom is open source so the re-new is a no brainer. The only way I would stop using Atom is if the developers somehow made it not function well. Or, if the project got forked to a commercial version or something. Or, there could be the case that development stops or that it was not updated on this or that platform
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No answers on this topic
Usability
I give Atom a 9 because it is one of the most modern text editors built with JavaScript intentionally to allow the editor to be changed and modified with custom functionality that a team may need. I think I would otherwise give atom an 8 due to support, but it gets a 9/10 because of the extensibility/plugin capability.
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PhpStorm is very easy to use, once you get the hang of it. It can take a while to get the hang of it because there's so many options, some of which are buried in the imposing settings panel. It could use some help with multi-cursor, especially multi-file editing but that's a minor gripe.
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Support Rating
Atom has an active forum and a Slack group where you can ask technical questions. Occasionally, the authors will pop in to answer a few questions here and there, but most of the time, its other helpful users who will assist you. Though they aren't the most knowledgeable, they are at least timely.
As for plugin support, that differs with each plugin, but as I mentioned before, many plugins are no longer maintained.
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The JetBrains community is all about helping others succeed, even in the most obscure setups. I have never had a question go unanswered, or I have never been able to come up with empty results in searching for the answer. My questions or concerns are typically address from other users in the community, so timing is pretty quick for a response
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Implementation Rating
Just download and install
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Atom is incredibly lighter than Dreamweaver, of course it doesn't have the tools DW provides in terms of preview and clicking an element to be taken to the code... but for small web pages this is not necessary.
Atom is more similar to Notepad++ and the very popular vs code... but I prefer it to vs code because of the themes (although i found recently some new additions that are similar to my favourite) and just the feeling when navigating/typing is not the same, it's very hard to describe... but it just doesn't feel "right"
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Each one of the products I've listed are great in their own right, but non of them provide as complete a solution as PhpStorm in my opinion. Very few products offer all of the features that PhpStorm does and those that do don't have the greatest performance in my experience. Some have a great text editor but lack other critical features while others have a bounty of features, but the text editor is garbage. Before I tried PhpStorm, I stuck to using simple text editors because the features the IDEs offered didn't outweigh performance hit of running such a large, slow program. PhpStorm isn't lightweight by any means but I haven't noticed any of the common performance issues that I experienced with other IDEs.
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Return on Investment
  • ROI can be said as neutral because eventually, we have to switch to another text editor because of many limitations of Atom for large code.
  • In starting stage of the project, everything was fine and things were happening as expected
  • Overall it has been a great experience using Atom in my organization but many challenges were faced so that's something Atom should work on.
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  • Recent AI advancements have saved us time to build by integrating it direct with the IDE allowing build to deployment to happen at a more rapid pace than previously possible
  • Integrated AI commit message generation saves time and effort from team members shorting time writing documentation allowing more time spent in development
  • Integrated git development causes less friction across team with version control and merge conflict resolution shortening development work flows
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ScreenShots