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NetBeans vs Oracle SQL Developer comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

NetBeans
Ranking in IDE
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Oracle SQL Developer
Ranking in IDE
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the IDE category, the mindshare of NetBeans is 4.9%, up from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle SQL Developer is 6.4%, up from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IDE Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Oracle SQL Developer6.4%
NetBeans4.9%
Other88.7%
IDE
 

Featured Reviews

DB
Java Developer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
Some of the valuable features are Java development, RCP ​support and support for various other languages.
* Java development support. (The Java editor is one of the best Java IMHO editors. Java projects support Ant and Maven.) * RCP support * GUI editor for Java windows * RCP support: An easy way to create your own app using NetBeans base. There is a lot of documentation for RCP creation. * Plugins can be easy created. Also there is support for other languages as C/C++, HTLM5, Javascript, Groovy, PHP... There is a lot of plugins that can be easily installed.
Vikram_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Architect at Ontario Power Generation
Has improved development efficiency through reusable components and intuitive programming features
When errors occur while programming, they are very generic. Even when searching the internet, the errors remain generic and it takes considerable time to understand the fix. This was predominantly felt because we were mostly working on writing code and developing features. Error handling needs to be improved. The patches and upgrade process is very long. In the last year and a half, I haven't upgraded, so we don't know if latest features have arrived. Another issue is with sessions. If we were working on code and then switch off our laptop for two to three days, the session would keep running. This consumes many resources and flags to the team that a user has been continuously using Oracle SQL Developer. There should be a timeout period for inactive sessions.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Overall, for our company, it has been a good addition, as development times have been shortened using NetBeans."
"Use it and you will not regret your decision."
"It is easy to deploy, manage servers, and ORMS resources."
"C++ 11 support (for a long time)"
"When you have to develop in Java, this IDE is ideal because it has many plugins that make your life easier... For example, when working with Hibernate or with JPA, creating entities is very easy through a graphical interface."
"It comes out of package fully-loaded with a lot of great features for web development."
"Large scale of projects, templates, and coding support."
"Go for it! You’ll never look back!"
"You can install it on every platform. It just works. The other thing is that it's free. And Oracle is committed to the development of the tool, so it has been improving."
"SQL Developer has reached a maturity level where it offers pretty much the same essential functionality (and much more) that you can find in other solutions, with the benefit of being free."
"Using execution plan, I am able to do lots of query tuning."
"The solution I've created is revenue forecasting and our organization goes to Wall Street with the earnings call, with the forecast."
"Included Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler; no PL/SQL IDE has such modelling capabilities, as far as I know, and this is a killer feature for me."
"Since Oracle SQL Developer is free, we no longer incurred the cost of the previous tool."
"The main benefit of SQL Developer is that it is free."
"Helps us to test and to develop scripts for monitoring applications."
 

Cons

"It is a very heavy load on the computer, especially when you compare with Sublime Text Limited plugins and themes."
"One of main areas that the tool can improve is performance."
"Background scanning of sources on demand, disallowed by Options (processor usage, build cannot be deleted by the old version build)."
"Debugging: Watches, Evaluate Expression, and data inspection are limited."
"The background scanning of projects should be optimized after starting NetBeans."
"There are always rooms for improvement for any product. The good thing with NetBeans is that since it is Open Source, you can just go ahead and contribute whatever you want to change yourself."
"There are always rooms for improvement for any product."
"The debugging mechanize could be improved compared to IntelliJ, for example."
"Versioning is there, check. But it sucks a lot, double check."
"It's not so stable. Sometimes it crashes, and the connection to the databases is bad."
"They were not supportive. I didn't get a solution."
"There are occasional run time issues."
"My only complaint over the years has been memory usage, which seems to improve with each release."
"I think it would be great to have an overview over the sessions it opens so that we could easily see and control which connections to the database we want to keep open, which ones are hanging; and it would be great to make them independent from each other."
"The downsides of Oracle SQL Developer include hard typing."
"I would say the layout should be improved. I've also have used PL/SQL Developer, and I like the layout, the landscape, of that application better than SQL Dev."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I am sad that CLion is not free. Currently, it has no support for Linux makefiles, only cmake, and this is a big mess."
"It is an open source and free tool, with no changes, and the licensing allows me even to change source code, if I need."
"NetBeans is free and open source."
"It's a no-cost license and it offers outstanding functionality on that basis."
"It's a free tool."
"It has the advantage that it's free. The next best competitor would cost several thousand dollars."
"It is basically free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
15%
Insurance Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Educational Organization
6%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Marketing Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise20
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle SQL Developer?
The pricing of Oracle SQL Developer depends on the size of the company and the project. I cannot use Oracle or other solutions if I am just starting. If I start with MySQL, it depends on the size o...
What needs improvement with Oracle SQL Developer?
I want to address performance issues with large amounts of data. When I run queries that return lakhs or millions of rows, Oracle SQL Developer sometimes freezes, takes time to load, or even crashe...
What is your primary use case for Oracle SQL Developer?
In my current project at Cognizant, Oracle SQL Developer is one of the targets to load the data after extracting and transforming it, so this is our use case for my project. For example, I was at a...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Weyco Group Inc.
Prinova
Find out what your peers are saying about NetBeans vs. Oracle SQL Developer and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
906,887 professionals have used our research since 2012.