Main Difference
Eclipse and Netbeans are both popular Integrated Development Environments (IDE) for Java Development, but may be used for other tasks and programming languages, too. The eclipse java code formatter is much more powerful that netbeans’. NetBeans is sponsored by Oracle. Eclipse is sponsored by IBM.
Eclipse
Eclipse is associated with IBM. Eclipse can do automatically format on Java sources at save time.This feature was release in NetBeans 7.3. Eclipse has a “synchronize” view which displays differences between VCS (e.g. SVN, CVS etc.) and the local working copy as a tree view.
Netbeans
NetBeans is a Sun/Oracle environment. Netbeans has a kind of synchronization view displaying the information as a table. Netbeans maven integration has a feature to install a non-maven artifact (without pom.xml) into local (and maybe other) maven repository.
Key Differences
- Eclipse can do automatically format on Java sources at save time.This feature was release in NetBeans 7.3.
- The eclipse java code formatter seems to be much more powerful that netbeans’
- NetBeans has the ability to open projects in different directories.
- NetBeans can open any Maven project without having to convert it to an Eclipse specific project.
- Netbeans maven integration has a feature to install a non-maven artifact (without pom.xml) into local (and maybe other) maven repository. Eclipse does not have this feature. There are only workarounds.
- Eclipse has a “synchronize” view which displays differences between VCS (e.g. SVN, CVS etc.) and the local working copy as a tree view. Netbeans has a kind of synchronization view, too, but it displays the information as a table.
- NetBeans is sponsored by Oracle. Eclipse is sponsored by IBM.
- NetBeans user interface is built on Swing (Java native lightweight toolkit). Eclipse user interface is built on SWT (a Java wrapper around the system’s underlying toolkit), so it needs compiled binary libraries that are platform dependent.
- There is no difference between the both of them under platform support. Eclipse and NetBeans have cross-platform support. You can have this application running on Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris and any other platform, as long as JVM (Java Virtual Machine) is installed.
- Both have a wide range of programming language support, which includes C/C++, Java, JavaScript and PHP. But how do you get this support is an interesting part. Eclipse is a plugin based IDE. Large part of its functionality comes from plugins. Features like Mobile application SDK’s, Rich Internet applications, and Architectural driven apps can be developed using plugins mostly. On the other hand NetBeans has many projects and is a tool based IDE. It incorporates many platforms using tooling support. Thus making it less scattered.