Will JetBrains ever make a free WebStorm Community edition?
Are there any plans on making a free WebStorm Community editions just like IntelliJ IDEA?
If JetBrains does that it could out VS Code out of the market. Writing code in VS Code is painful.
The only product that is better than VS Code is WebStorm, but sadly you have to pay for it :(
Update from JetBrains as of October 2024: Starting with v2024.2.4, WebStorm can be used for free for non-commercial purposes. See this blog post for more details.
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No plans; what you'd expect from it? The same functionality for free?
Well, it is done with the IntelliJ IDEA Community edition.
I can't see why there can't be a community edition for WebStorm. If not I guess will have to stick with VS Code :x
IDEA Community edition has a very limited feature set as compared with Ultimate. With similar approach, you would be left with a useless IDE that provides nothing but a basic support for raw JavaScript, HTML and CSS
Not sure I follow what you're saying. If IntelliJ does it successfully (use Ultimate at work and love it, and I use Community Edition at home and love it), then why can't WebStorm?
Not trying to argue with you - we're just wanna-be customers telling you that you're losing market share to VS Code simply because it's free. Do with that information what you will (hopefully releasing a community edition)!
JetBrains desperately needs to change its business model. WebStorm is a powerful IDE while VS Code is a mediocre text editor, worse than Notepad++. They must change their business model and replicate the Azure-VSCode model. They need to reach an agreement with a competitor of Azure that may be Google Cloud (or Amazon AWS) and offer specific UIs and Welcome screens for Google Cloud services installed by default. Google would gain more developers on its cloud platform and WebStorm could be downloaded for free (legally). JetBrains have an agreement with Unity Tecnologies on Rider IDE so what I'm saying is not impossible.
"wanna-be customers" is right on the spot. "You must give us for free, because we desperately want free stuff!" What's in it for JB?
OTOH, a free product always has a major caveat: who pays for the development, and how?
"Give me for free" is not a customer; that's an outstretched hand. Interpret that as you wish.
(Full disclosure: Jetbrains' IDE user of many years - it's worth every last penny)
JetBrains could strike a deal with Google and make some profit, and if they did it with IntelliJ and PyCharm, why not WebStorm, IntelliJ CE is pretty good, so WebStorm CE isn't necessarily a bad IDE, and JetBrains would get more popularity because users would recommend the products more often and so JetBrains IDEs would have more users, also VSCode is free and I think that more people would use it and so JetBrains's market share would shrink, like I currently use VSCode just because it's free and not half-bad
The best way is that you apply the same strategy like you people do in the python community edition. Not given the whole functionalities as an alike trial version.
How about supporting only basic HTML/CSS/JavaScript without frameworks/libraries in Community Edition? Some don't need special framework/library support and can use CE for a long time and then when they need they'll upgrade it to a paid edition. The company won't loose any current customers, but may gain potential customers.
Honestly all I use JetBrains products for nowadays is resolving more complex merge issues with IntelliJ community edition :D For everything else there is VSCode and plugins. I mean WebStorm is cool, but it costs money?! "Someone has to pay our salarieees", Well, figure it out, so many people have done that before you. I thought you have "brains" ?!
Ravshan Samandarov there is WebCalm plugin that adds support for JavaScript and CSS. As you said - just basic features - no framework/library support. It's free and open-source.