IBM has published a series of articles that compare Eclipse to various other IDEs. The three articles are titled “Migrating to Eclipse…”, which makes it pretty clear that there is an obvious bias towards Eclipse. Nevertheless, if you are familiar with one of the other IDEs, this might be a worthwhile read.
Eclipse vs. IntelliJ IDEA Eclipse vs. JBuilder Foundation Eclipse vs. Netbeans
Personally, I’m still torn between IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse. I have evaluated Eclipse for the past 6 weeks or so, and overall I’m pretty impressed with it. It does however have a few quirks, particularly when it comes to CVS or Ant integration, and generally is not quite as polished as IDEA (except for the very nice UI).
If I had a license for IntelliJ IDEA 4.0, I would probably go with this. My somewhat dated IDEA 3.0 license makes this a tougher choice. Even though this is still a great IDE, Eclipse is a lot newer and has a few advanced features. Most importantly, it has a great plugin architecture, with many useful plugins available for free from third party developers. This makes it very powerful. I believe that the upcoming patch release is going to address many of the bugs in the final 3.0 release, which will make Eclipse an even better choice.