Best alternatives to RubyMine (Paid & Free)

For Ruby on Rails developers, RubyMine is one of the most reliable integrated development environments. It comes with essential tools and integrations that make it easy for developers to get their application development going. However, as a tech company, it makes sense that you introduce your developers to other development solutions to avoid over-reliance on one IDE.

This article will highlight the best free and paid alternatives to RubyMine to aid your selection should you wish to explore another IDE for your development.

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What is RubyMine?

JetBrain’s RubyMine is a Ruby on Rails IDE that provides essential tools with developer-friendly integrations for productive and efficient application development. The IDE comes with an intelligent ruby code editor, superb coding assistance, scope-based and type-aware code completion and more.

Another feature of the RubyMine IDE is its error highlighting, code refactoring and code formatting capabilities which facilitate coding. This IDE tool is compatible with all the major operating systems, including macOS, Windows and Linux.

RubyMine features

There are many notable features found in the RubyMine IDE. You should know these features before choosing an alternative IDE. Some of these features include:

Smart code inspection

The RubyMine IDE has a smart code inspection capability and you should be looking out for this feature in any RubyMine Alternative. This feature helps you to inspect your code on the go to minimize errors in your code base. This feature is also complemented by the refactoring capability, which helps perform quick fixes and changes to your projects.

Testing and debugging

RubyMine also features a powerful graphical user interface-based testing and debugging tool that can run through your code, set breakpoints, view the existing breakpoints and help you find bugs faster.

Code efficiency with a smart editor

RubyMine’s smart editor is designed to help developers produce quality code efficiently. The smart editor supports code formatting, auto-completion, error highlighting and language-specific-aware syntax functions.

Smart search

RubyMine features a smart search tool where you can easily search and jump to any file, symbol or class. For example, with the smart search option, it takes one click for developers to switch between declaration, super method, tests and usages. There is also seamless navigation with an MVC-based project view and gem dependencies diagrams.

Integrations

You can enjoy a wide range of integration that helps you manage your project environment better on RubyMine. Some notable integrations include rails generator, rake task runner, bundler and Zeus. In addition, you can easily configure and deploy your projects through file transfer protocol or secure file transfer protocol and successfully run your infrastructure with Chef, Puppet or Vagrant

Top free alternatives to RubyMine

Atom

GitHub’s Atom is a free, cross-platform text and source code editor compatible with Linux, macOS and Windows operating systems. It’s embedded with plug-ins written in JavaScript and has some advanced Git controls.

If you’re looking for a RubyMine free alternative, Atom may be a perfect option. From a built-in package manager that helps you to search for and install new packages or create your own, smart autocompletion that helps you to write code faster with a smart and flexible autocomplete, to multiple interface split capability, Atom makes software development easier.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio’s community edition is another RubyMine free alternative if you wish to explore an IDE with the tools to help you code, build, debug, deploy and collaborate on many projects.

If you’re a developer at the enterprise level and need to work with different teams simultaneously, Microsoft’s Visual Studio supports many collaborative tools such as TeamSupport, Target Process and Microsoft Teams. This IDE also supports multiple programming languages.

Eclipse

Here is another open-source RubyMine free alternative for developers. Although Eclipse is better known for developing Java-based applications, it also supports multiple other programming languages.

Eclipse features tools and customization that may interest many developers. It offers many integrations in APIs and provides important tools that facilitate code editing, project collaboration, data modeling, debugging and deployment management.

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With the Eclipse cloud function, developers can code from anywhere and return to their code base whenever they deem fit. It allows you to use your browser as a hosted workspace, making it a modern development environment for developers.

Top paid alternatives to RubyMine

IntelliJ IDEA

JetBrain’s IntelliJ IDEA is a paid integrated development environment for building java-based and other programming language projects more efficiently. This IDE offers deep intelligence and on-the-fly code analysis in all areas of software development, such as debugging, testing and deploying a finished application. Various operating systems, including macOS, Windows and Linux, are compatible with IntelliJ IDEA.

WebStorm

WebStorm is an integrated development environment that makes your development experience easier, automating routine work and helping you handle complex tasks easily. It also offers some outstanding features like team collaboration and a customizable environment where you can configure the built-in functionality to match your preference.

Komodo IDE

Komodo IDE is a powerful app development tool for  Mac, Windows and Linux that features multi-language programming in Ruby, Python, Go, Node.js, PHP, HTML, JavaScript  and various other frameworks.

With Komodo, developers are supported with real-time debugging, version control integration, code intelligence and more.