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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."
"Large scale of projects, templates, and coding support."
"NetBeans has helped us to increase our productivity and defect solving since the IDE is smart."
"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."
"Server Support"
"Use it and you will not regret your decision."
"I recommend NetBeans because it is easy to use, open source, free of charge, and has really strong community."
"It comes out of package fully-loaded with a lot of great features for web development."
"Using execution plan, I am able to do lots of query tuning."
"It allows us to implement a form of test driven development (TDD) for database-resident code."
"Everybody should try it because you do not have to code things to create output from JSON or DDL."
"Since Oracle SQL Developer is free, we no longer incurred the cost of the previous tool."
"Customer Service: Good. Technical Support: Good."
"Technical support is great; they are extremely responsive and helpful with issues and questions."
"Helps us to test and to develop scripts for monitoring applications."
"It’s a great tool for accessing and exploring Oracle Databases."
 

Cons

"Debugging: Watches, Evaluate Expression, and data inspection are limited."
"It is a very heavy load on the computer, especially when you compare with Sublime Text Limited plugins and themes."
"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."
"Background scanning of sources on demand, disallowed by Options (processor usage, build cannot be deleted by the old version build)."
"I would like there to be better integration with Git, as there are IDEs such as Eclipse that offer this integration in a much more elegant way than NetBeans."
"There are always rooms for improvement for any product."
"One of main areas that the tool can improve is performance."
"The background scanning of projects should be optimized after starting NetBeans."
"SQL Developer only shows a snapshot of the execution statistics and performance metrics at the moment you request the report."
"The initial setup is always a problem, it cannot find the Java SDK."
"Scalability has room for improvement. Often if you have to do a heavy load of queries or are getting large result sets you have to be careful not to overload the Java virtual machine that's running."
"If you're trying to return exceedingly large data sets into the tool for some reason to download, that could be a challenge, depending on the memory on your machine and the disk space you have to output it to."
"Even though it installs easy, there is a lot of Java behind the tool. It seems like some of the Java is more memory-intensive."
"There are occasional runtime issues that are easily worked around, especially on a Windows deployment."
"Oracle SQL Developer could improve the speed, it is a bit slow."
"The interface could be friendlier for the DBA by having the dashboard show real-time statistics from the database engine."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an open source and free tool, with no changes, and the licensing allows me even to change source code, if I need."
"I am sad that CLion is not free. Currently, it has no support for Linux makefiles, only cmake, and this is a big mess."
"NetBeans is free and open source."
"It's a no-cost license and it offers outstanding functionality on that basis."
"It has the advantage that it's free. The next best competitor would cost several thousand dollars."
"It is basically free."
"It's a free tool."
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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
21%
Marketing Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Healthcare 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.
903,871 professionals have used our research since 2012.