PhpStorm Reviews & Insights

Score9 out of 10

96 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for PhpStorm are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Intuitive User Interface: Several reviewers have praised the intuitive and user-friendly interface of PhpStorm, stating that it allows for efficient completion of tasks. Users found it easy to navigate and appreciated features such as running SQL commands directly from the software, eliminating the need for additional clients.

Shortcut Keys Enhance Productivity: Many users have highlighted the availability of shortcut keys in PhpStorm, mentioning how they greatly assisted in the coding process and enhanced productivity. This feature allows developers to quickly execute commands and perform actions without relying solely on the mouse.

Assistive Features Improve Coding Experience: Numerous reviewers have expressed their appreciation for the auto-generation of assistive features in PhpStorm, such as autocomplete and tooltips from PHPDoc comments. These features not only make coding faster but also reduce errors by providing helpful suggestions and reminders.

PhpStorm Reviews

9 Reviews

Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees)

PhpStorm is the ideal IDE for any serious PHP or WordPress developer

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 30, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

PhpStorm is the preferred IDE for my development team. We use it to build our websites, leveraging it's fantastic feature set and AI features to speed and ease the development of our small and large scale projects. It makes managing projects in git significantly easier along with things like code completion, error handling, validation, etc.

Pros

git version control in software is superior to any other product
resolving merge conflicts is a breeze in comparison to other tools and is built in
switching between different projects in a simple interface makes managing multiple sites significantly easier
latest AI integrations make working with modern AI significantly easier

Cons

Some of the newest github copilot features lag behind what's being done in vs code and would be nice if more of the newer features were brought over though this has greatly improved recently
Interface can be a little overwhelming for newcomers
Some features like rainbow brackets should be native rather than addon

Likelihood to Recommend

Any developer that wants to level up their game and move beyond the free tools available should consider using PhptStorm or other Jetbrains IDE. They are ideal for developers where version control is important and provide most of the vital features developers need out of the box compared to free alternatives.

Mark Davoli

Director, Web Development at Amsive (Marketing & Advertising, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

Verified on LinkedIn

PhpStorm is the best

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 29, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it for the entire technological aspect of our systems developed with Laravel. We find its performance, indexing, and versatility to be able to install plugins that help further enhance the IDE quite useful.The integrated AI tool is also quite useful for generating generic or basic code that is tedious to constantly generate.

Pros

IA
Indexing
Searching

Cons

Diagrams
Selecting Code
DB

Likelihood to Recommend

In general, PhpStorm is a very complete IDE, although it is good for small projects, its strength is the management of large projects, its indexing helps you know where things are, its search engine is wonderful, and as I mentioned before, it becomes even more powerful with its plugins to enhance weak points, its integrated AI tool is very good, both for generating code, resolving doubts or refactoring complete flows.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (Computer Hardware company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

PhpStorm Review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 1, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use PhpStorm to design our projects using Laravel and VueJS frameworks. PhpStorm allows us to run commands and tie into databases all from 1 interface.

Pros

Indexing Code
Plugin Support
Efficiency

Cons

Different Licensing structure.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is less appropriate if it's a casual user that doesn't want to pay a yearly license fee.

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology (Financial Services company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

PhpStorm, Versioning and Database all in one

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

November 25, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The University's development team used PhpStorm.

Pros

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.

Cons

After some version updates, the application started to slow down to initialize or perform some operations.
The process for initializing the source code debugging is a bit obscure, so I had to resort to videos teaching how to execute.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is ideal for backend or even frontend developers. With versioning facilities and access to different databases, all in one application.
Not interesting when you need to make minor adjustments/maintenance to third party codes, punctual things since it takes a long time to initialize.

Diego Pacheco

Diego Pacheco in Information Technology at Universidade Estadual de Ciencias da Saude de Alagoas - UNCISAL (Education Management, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

PHPStorm is a flexible and feature-rich IDE for large codebases

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

October 15, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We're a mid-sized web agency that plans and builds large-scale CMS implementations for our clients. Often, we use Drupal - and that means working with a righteous heap of PHP. Developers and architects have the flexibility to choose their own tools, but quite a few of us have settled on PHPStorm due to its solid integration with tools like Vagrant, XDebug, and assorted source control systems. Its ability to scan a codebase and build an autocomplete/tooltip database out of the code's PHPDoc comments is invaluable, and it brings work on a large PHP codebase a bit closer to the luxurious Visual Studio experience.

Pros

Auto-generation of assistive features like autocomplete and tooltips from a project's own PHPDoc comments.
Simple configuration of popular PHP debugging tools that work even when they're running inside a virtual machine.
Simple plugin and template formats that make customizing the environment easy for centrally managed teams.

Cons

PHPStorm can be sluggish loading large codebases, especially if it hasn't had time to parse and cache all of the metadata yet.

Likelihood to Recommend

For small codebases, PHPStorm might be overkill — simpler editors are probably good enough. But if you're wrangling large projects with a complex tree of composer dependencies, complex coding standards, deep class hierarchies, and wacky custom plugin architectures, PHPStorm will save your bacon.

Jeff Eaton

Senior Digital Strategist in Professional Services at Lullabot (Internet, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

View profile

The perfect storm of PHP development tools.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 29, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

PhpStorm is being used by a handful of developers in our organization. We needed a product for the development of various PHP projects and PhpStorm is the best IDE for PHP/web development on the market in my opinion. Because of the plethora of great features Phpstorm offers, it really is an all in one solution for development. In most cases, it solves the problem of requiring multiple tools to complete a task.

Pros

The text editor is second to none and highly configurable.
It's very easy to personalize the settings to fit your needs. Anything from keybindings, preferred color schemes, fonts, desired code format, and code inspections can be controlled through the settings.
Phpstorm does a very good job of saving, importing, exporting settings so upgrading your Phpstorm version doesn't require you to redo all your settings. This is also beneficial if you are setting up Phpstorm on another computer or sharing your company coding style guide with other developers. Simply export as much or as little of your settings as you'd like, then import them on another machine.
Development Tooling: Phpstorm not only helps you write better code through the various code inspections it performs but it also helps you manage your code with built-in deployment and version control tools. In addition, you no longer require a separate tool for interacting with a database, you can execute your query directly from the text editor or open up a database console in a new tab to query the database(s).

Cons

I would like to see builtin support for NoSQL databases, particularly Redis. I know there are community plugins that provide a solution for this but I really would like to see PhpStorm handle NoSQL natively.
I would like to see a more fully fleshed out Git client implementation. I really think that if they spent a little more time on it they could provide a tool that would rival other competitors like GitKraken, Sourcetree, or SmartGit.

Likelihood to Recommend

PhpStorm is well suited for any project that utilizes PHP. I have used it on Windows, Ubuntu, and Mac OS and it works great on all those platforms. Having a solution that keeps the developer from having to constantly switch tools to do their job is invaluable. Whether you're a junior developer, front end engineer or a senior developer, PhpStorm is a great product that will help you get your work done.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (Legal Services company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

PhpStorm is an amazing IDE

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 31, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

PhpStorm is used to write code and troubleshoot issues faster and more reliably by all our developers. It can be used to debug, profile, run SQL, view and edit the database, autocomplete functions, etc. It's the best IDE I have used so far and has an enormous array of features and options.

Pros

Combine everything you could need in an IDE
Color coding syntax, autocomplete, helpful hints
Easy debugging and db view/editing

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

PhpStorm is well suited for anything, except someone just starting out or who cannot pay for the license. It may seem a touch complicated with the many options, and be unnecessary for someone learning to program for the first year.

Josh Stapp

Lead Developer in Engineering at EnsembleIQ (Computer Software, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Verified on LinkedIn

Develop your web with PhpStorm

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 28, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use PhpStorm in the software development group, especially for PHP projects or projects that have at least one PHP module. When I decided to buy it (due to the insistence of a team member) I was skeptical that it worth the money spent. However, soon I realized this is a powerful IDE for PHP development, with many nice and useful features that improve the speed of development and productivity.

Pros

Integration with almost any source code control system.
Code assistance - PhpStorm has the best code assistance I have seen in my career in an IDE with an advanced syntax highlighting mode. It is helping write the code faster and reduces the number of bugs.
The graphics of the files comparison tool are really nice and helpful.
Code refactoring is done well.
Extended plugin list available.

Cons

It is limited to PHP, CSS, HTML. Support for other programming languages would be nice
Steep learning curve - it needs some time and training for a developer to use PhpStorm at its full capacity.
To run optimally, PhpStorm needs a machine with 16GB RAM, which is an add-on to its cost.
It is not free. Not expensive, but not free.
Some performance issues are there during code refactoring and cause extensive changes in the project.

Likelihood to Recommend

I highly recommend PhpStorm specifically for web development involving PHP, CSS, and HTML. This IDE has everything you need to do this, and more. Once the team members learn it, it will increase the speed of development, the quality of the code(therefore fewer bugs) and overall it will increase the team's productivity, delivering projects/features faster to market and saving the company money.

Cristian Bodnarasec

Senior Software Development Manager in Information Technology at eSilicon (Semiconductors, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

PhpStorm, a great tool for developers

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

November 28, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently I use PhpStorm to write and edit PHP scripts used to automate API calls and load data into our database. In the past, I have used it for WordPress website creation and maintenance. Other developers that I work with also use PhpStorm and other JetBrians products. PhpStorm is our main, go-to platform for PHP projects large and small.

Pros

Customization of the code windows and interface allows each developer to work in a comfortable environment.
Built in tools like Git and ftp clients, allow for quick deployment and editing code on development environments.
Easy and smart code completion is very helpful in speeding up your coding and reducing typos.
The way projects are organized allows users to ensure they are working on the proper project and the proper files within.
Free for students and great discounts after graduation.
Multi Platform, including Linux.

Cons

Slow start up times.
Sometimes PhpStorm can be intimidating and overwhelming for new users.
Not a good platform for single script edits.

Likelihood to Recommend

PhpStorm is well suited for individual PHP Developers, as well as teams. With the integration of version control and deployment tools, it can be a one stop shop for most developers or development teams. PhpStorm is the perfect tool for working on projects with multiple files and connections. On the other hand, if someone is used to jumping in and out of projects, and updating one or two files at random, this is not a good tool due to the long load times compared with a more basic text and code editor.

Benjamin Hale

Digital Marketing Analyst in Marketing at Orbis Education (Education Management, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

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The perfect storm of PHP development tools.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 29, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

The text editor is second to none and highly configurable.
It's very easy to personalize the settings to fit your needs. Anything from keybindings, preferred color schemes, fonts, desired code format, and code inspections can be controlled through the settings.
Phpstorm does a very good job of saving, importing, exporting settings so upgrading your Phpstorm version doesn't require you to redo all your settings. This is also beneficial if you are setting up Phpstorm on another computer or sharing your company coding style guide with other developers. Simply export as much or as little of your settings as you'd like, then import them on another machine.
Development Tooling: Phpstorm not only helps you write better code through the various code inspections it performs but it also helps you manage your code with built-in deployment and version control tools. In addition, you no longer require a separate tool for interacting with a database, you can execute your query directly from the text editor or open up a database console in a new tab to query the database(s).

Cons

I would like to see builtin support for NoSQL databases, particularly Redis. I know there are community plugins that provide a solution for this but I really would like to see PhpStorm handle NoSQL natively.
I would like to see a more fully fleshed out Git client implementation. I really think that if they spent a little more time on it they could provide a tool that would rival other competitors like GitKraken, Sourcetree, or SmartGit.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (Legal Services company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience