A new competitor to Visual Studio Code emerges, and it’s a well-known one.
In a somewhat surprising move, JetBrains recently announced that two of its IDEs, WebStorm and Rider, are now free to use for non-commercial purposes: learning, contributing to open source, and developing hobby projects.
This is a significant (and most welcome!) departure from the purely subscription-based pricing model, which might’ve been a barrier for some programmers.
And it’s not a “community edition” situation either. With the non-commercial license, you get almost the same experience as the paid option. One notable difference is that telemetry collection can’t be disabled in the free version.
A win for developers
Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is the long-standing go-to editor in the JavaScript and TypeScript communities, both professional and casual. It’s free, relatively lightweight, and has a sprawling ecosystem of extensions and, more recently, forks.
By offering WebStorm at no cost for personal use, JetBrains is directly challenging VS Code’s dominance in the space. Which is fantastic news for developers, as competition is always a good thing.
Another competitor
It’s worth mentioning that JetBrains is working on another code editor, Fleet, which is currently in early access and is also free to use.
Fleet is a streamlined, uncluttered editor that looks similar to VS Code or even Sublime Text. Under the hood, however, it runs the same language services as other JetBrains IDEs, so you get the WebStorm refactoring tools and code inspections with a nice minimalistic interface.
Which editor do you prefer for your projects? Let us know in the comments!
