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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 June 2026, in the IDE category, the mindshare of NetBeans is 4.8%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle SQL Developer is 6.4%, up from 4.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IDE Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Oracle SQL Developer6.4%
NetBeans4.8%
Other88.8%
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

"I recommend NetBeans because it is easy to use, open source, free of charge, and has really strong community."
"Server Support"
"Setup is very simple and short, and integrating existing code and projects is also very simple."
"Go for it! You’ll never look back!"
"It comes out of package fully-loaded with a lot of great features for web development."
"NetBeans Platform can be freely used as a desktop application base, where all the functionality is prepared for me and I make only the business modules."
"It is easy to deploy, manage servers, and ORMS resources."
"C++ 11 support (for a long time)"
"The solution I've created is revenue forecasting and our organization goes to Wall Street with the earnings call, with the forecast."
"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."
"It's free and very user-friendly."
"We used to use SQL *Plus, but we needed something with more of a GUI for users who are not technical users."
"It's easy to deploy, I can copy it onto the system and run it without having to install it and this makes it a very good solution for quick use."
"It has done everything that I needed it to do, and it doesn't cost you anything."
"Customer Service: Good. Technical Support: Good."
"It's free, it's very easy to use, and has a nice GUI."
 

Cons

"The debugging mechanize could be improved compared to IntelliJ, for example."
"It is a very heavy load on the computer, especially when you compare with Sublime Text Limited plugins and themes."
"The background scanning of projects should be optimized after starting NetBeans."
"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."
"One of main areas that the tool can improve is performance."
"There are always rooms for improvement for any product."
"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."
"Queries."
"They were not supportive. I didn't get a solution."
"The initial setup is always a problem, it cannot find the Java SDK."
"The areas of Oracle SQL Developer that need improvement are in cloud."
"There are occasional runtime issues that are easily worked around, especially on a Windows deployment."
"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 stability depends on what version you're using. There are more successful versions and are less successful versions. For example, 17.3 is less successful. There were many bugs. Now, we are trying to pull all the developers to upgrade to 17.4."
"The downsides of Oracle SQL Developer include hard typing."
 

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 has the advantage that it's free. The next best competitor would cost several thousand dollars."
"It's a no-cost license and it offers outstanding functionality on that basis."
"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.
902,495 professionals have used our research since 2012.