TrustRadius Insights for Atom are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Highly Customizable: Many users have praised Atom for its high level of customization. They appreciate the ability to tailor their coding environment to their preferences, with various themes and extensions available. This feature allows them to make their code easier to read and navigate, enhancing their overall coding experience.
Code Hinting Features: Several reviewers have been impressed with Atom's code hinting capabilities. This feature helps them write code faster and integrates well with services like LINT, allowing them to clean up their code according to their team's style choices. Users find this functionality particularly useful in speeding up their coding process.
Free Software: The fact that Atom is free has been seen as a major advantage by many users. They appreciate not having to invest in expensive software while still being able to access a robust coding environment. This affordability makes it accessible to a wide range of developers.
Atom is a powerful editor that is being used by development teams for coding in any given programming language. We were looking to unify the developer's experience and work on a single platform, as opposed to everyone having their own editor. Although it is not made mandatory, we had a pretty good and quick adoption of the product throughout the years. Atom is very customizable, which helps tremendously.
Pros
Lightweight, intuitive interface that is almost self-explanatory
Highly customizable (themes, plugins, language support)
Great community support with open-source extensions
Cons
Some stability issues such as intermittent crashes
Developers with advanced needs will not find equivalents to VS Studio
Managing plugins at the corporate level can be cumbersome
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.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Professional Services (Information Technology and Services company, 11-50 employees)
Atom is my favourite free, open-source editor. We have use Atom in our development projects. We have used it as a collaboration tool by integrating with Git hub - it was easy to set it up so that the team can work on the same project at the same time from different computers. The code syntax is coloured by language type - which is helpful to see your code. We use it for HTML, JS, CSS, Sass, and PHP editing.
Pros
HTML, CSS, PHP and other code or text editing
Project collaboration with team and developers
Free and Open Source
Good looking interface
Colour coded syntax
Cons
High start-up time
Likelihood to Recommend
Atom is a great scripting tool for individuals, freelancers, and small development teams. The interface is slick, and if you require bits of functionality, there are packages which you can add on. No accounts or activation code - just download it, and the user can start coding and launching their web development project in a flash. I sometimes use it for the find and replace function for modifying and editing large batches of plain text.
Atom is used by only the development team in my organization. Atom has a simple UI that makes users use it without any issues. It has support for GitHub and has a lot of plugins. Along with this, a user can write its own plugin. Support code formating for different languages and its minimap feature also helps sometimes. It is being used to develop clean, well-structured code for our product. It is simply perfect because of everything it provides. The next best thing about Atom is that you have git control over it which helps to make things super easy in terms of open sourcing.
Pros
Adding packages in preferable language
Formatting of code making it easy to read for all users
Support for GitHub and plugins and plugin development
It is able to handle large amounts of data without slowing down
Cons
There should be a better user tips manual page to learn keyboard shortcuts
It would also be beneficial if mathematical and data analytic tools were added
it has quite high start-up timing when you open large projects to work on it
Sometimes, atom closed suddenly and do not open again
It still lacks better options with the previews even though there are already some by users adding plugins
It doesn't have self-correct features for lint errors, unlike IntelliJ
Likelihood to Recommend
Atom is well suited for users who just beginning with their development careers. For developing production level or at the local level, for any use-case Atom is well suited as it provides support for many plugins and version control too. It is not suitable for heavy projects because it takes a lot of time in getting opened and also stops unexpectedly in between. It can be used by early-stage startups who are just beginning their project but when there is an ample amount of code, then they must switch to some other software.
Atom IDE is a very nice application having inbuilt CLI and it supports multiple extensions and programming languages. I and our coder are using Atom and VS Code mainly because these applications are easy to use and need very low system configurations.
Pros
Integrated CLI
Lightweight
Easy to user
Support extensions
Cons
Affects performance
Plugins issues
Support GIT
Likelihood to Recommend
I have been using this product since my college days when I had a very low system configuration PC. It's a very good application but sometimes the mix plugins back-end gives unnecessary errors. All features like multiple programming language support, extensions, etc. are personally good. Sometimes we face performance effects when using for the last many hours.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (Information Technology & Services company, 1-10 employees)
In our organization (software house), it is totally developers' choice in the engineering department to choose the IDE of their own choice. I was impressed by the shortcuts of Atom like Toggle Comment, Column Selection, Select Same Words, etc. and to install the Packages for ease of development. So that's why I migrated to it.
Pros
Built-in package manager.
Smart auto completion feature was great.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Features that Atom has provided were superb. I was able to do a lot of things with shortcuts like duplicate word selections, tree hierarchy of folders, the drag/drop file/folder support, etc.
We use Atom for coding in different software projects. All developers use Atom, but we also have other editors available. The GIT integration of Atom makes our workflow more manageable. The FTP plugin also helps to connect and edit files on the server directly.
Pros
Git integration
FTP integration
Cons
Git integration is very complicated to set up.
In general Atom offers complex features that require time to get familiarized with.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited for developers and people who are writing with text editors all day. Not so suitable for casual use, as it is rather complex to use efficiently, and it takes a couple of seconds more to open than Notepad.
I've been using Atom to code custom websites for my organization, and previously for a small web design company. While I am the sole user in my organization, I use Atom to code in PHP (for custom Wordpress sites), HTML, some javascript, and even SASS for CSS. The ability to manage an entire project in one environment is key to a good workflow.
Pros
Color Coding for ease of organization.
Excellent customization - visually and functionally.
Cons
Integrated SASS compilers (or similar) would be a great asset.
The ability to create "draft" or backups of files would be a nice feature.
Likelihood to Recommend
Atom does a great job of allowing you to work in multiple coding languages (in my case, HTML, PHP, Javascript, and CSS/SASS) with no confusion. The color-coding, organization, and ability to customize your workspace is extremely helpful as well. The addition of packages, for FTP upload, for example, makes for a quick and easy workflow.
I use Atom for C++ development because I enjoy its user interface and I like how extensible it is. I first discovered Atom when a mentor of mine introduced me to the Beta. I was immediately drawn to the fact that it has support for plugins written in Node.js, which I am a big fan of. I also like its Git integration. The fact that the whole app is written in what are essentially web development technologies also appeals to me, given my history in web development. Since I do a lot of Android development, I use Android Studio. However, for the JNI layer and native code (written in C++, in my case) I prefer using Atom over Android Studio.
Pros
Git integration
Plugin ecosystem
C++ development
Cons
Sometimes things do not work as expected. Atom has improved a lot over the last couple of years, but it still could use some polish.
Atom needs plugins for quality-of-life improvements. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it allows you to customize Atom to suit your needs.
It would be nice if Atom had some recommended starter packages that come with popular plugins for highlighting, soft-wrapping and so on.
There are some plugins that could be turned into core Atom features, like Linter and Beautify.
Likelihood to Recommend
Atom is excellent for writing code in any of its supported languages, although for Java, C#, or Objective C, it would probably not be my first choice. The reason is that there are other more robust IDEs that are made especially for those languages (e.g. Eclipse, Visual Studio, and Xcode). I use Atom for writing C++ but I also love it for web development. It's great when you want to customize your development environment for your particular workflow and have time to spare digging into the nitty-gritty of configuration, as well as trying out a lot of different plugins and removing the ones that don't work well. In general, it's great when you have the time to set it up right, and not as good when you want to get moving quickly without a lot of configuration.
I am the only user of Atom at my organization, but it was the editor of choice at my previous job. It is used for quick-and-dirty text manipulation, as well as for C# and Javascript coding.
Pros
Atom has an amazing plugin library that is easy to use and integrates seamlessly.
Specifically, Atom's multi-cursor plug-in functionality provides a powerful method for manipulating text in bulk.
Atom provides good syntax highlighting and other interactive support for a number of programming languages through its available plug-ins.
Cons
Some of Atom's default UX could be improved. Depending on your previous workspace, it can open with two panes and a welcome tab in each, requiring you to close lots of cruft on startup.
Atom's documentation and plugin marketplace could be a little more discoverable.
Likelihood to Recommend
Atom is great as a general-purpose text editor, and is especially powerful for bulk text editing, and scripting languages where a more heavy-weight IDE isn't as appropriate (e.g. Javascript, Coffeescript, Ruby, Python, etc.)
Atom is my main text editor for developing code. It is built by the GitHub team and has a native integration of Git, which is very helpful. Available for OSX, Windows and Linux, it is my favorite text editor for both work and personal projects.
Pros
Native Git integration.
Optional plugins and customization.
Cross-platform
Has all the things expected to develop code.
Cons
Maybe they can improve the themes. I haven't found a theme that I really love...