Intellij Idea IDE OpenSourced - The current state of the Java IDE's

It is a great news that Jetbrains has opensourced the Intellij Idea, a well known Java Editor. I have used it along with both Eclipse and Netbeans in the past.

Last year, I decided to buy a professional license for the intellij and never looked back. So, what would I say about eclipse, Netbeans and Intellij ?

Well, frankly speaking, they all have their positives. In fact, they are all competing on a very high level now.

Lets compare them based on few criterias :

1. User Adoption : Eclipse wins easily. However, I guess with today's announcement, it is going to be exciting. Don't forget Netbeans is releasing the 6.8 beta shortly, and it has significantlly improved.

2. Company Backing : Although Eclipse was started by IBM, Jetbrains owns intellij and Netbeans is owned by Sun (ohh.. I guess it is Oracle), but now the open source has changed the game. It is all about users, developers, speed and plugins.

3. Speed :- I don't have a benchmark, however the last time I felt, Eclipse and Intellij both were better. Netbeans still needs to work on it (I last tried the full j2ee version of it - 6.5, never tried 6.7).

4. Plugins :- Again Eclipse wins by the numbers. As far as quality is concerned, Intellij would probably be the best. Again, used mostly the in-built plugins for the netbeans (Correct me, and add comments if you find it better). However, now I see all the three editors have got a nice plugin framework and lots of developers writing for them.

5. Maven Support :- Hmm....Here the Netbeans is the one, closely followed by Intellij.

6. Usability :- Power users like Intellij with the best Refactoring offering , intelligent shortcuts, the awesome customer care support.

7.Dynamic Language Support (Ruby/JRuby/Groovy) :- NetBeans is the best IDE for Ruby/JRuby(I am not including Rubymine from Jetbrains, as it is a separate product). For Groovy, my vote goes to Intellij again.

I think as now Intellij has provided the free editor (Community Edition), more people would give it a try, and hence would be in a better position to compare it (And who knows may be then buy the Professional Edition eventually).

What do you think ?

Update : Here is the comparison chart for the OpenSource version vs the Commercial One.