IntelliJ Community is the open source upstream of JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA, forming the core of a powerful, extensible, and intelligent development environment. It provides foundational features like a robust editor with code completion, syntax highlighting, refactoring tools, version control integrations, terminal, debugger, and plugin architecture. Since it’s open, community developers can contribute to language supports, UI tweaks, and platform enhancements. From this base, JetBrains builds full editions (Ultimate) by layering proprietary features for enterprise frameworks and integrations. IntelliJ Community supports multiple JVM-based languages (Java, Kotlin, Scala, Groovy) and serves as a host for plugin ecosystems that add support for web, database, and cloud tooling. The project emphasizes performance, modularity, and a responsive user experience, maintaining a codebase that balances long-term maintainability with cutting-edge developer features.
Features
- Full-featured IDE for Java, Kotlin, and other JVM languages
- Open source foundation for JetBrains’ ecosystem, enabling derivative IDEs like PyCharm
- Supports project building, refactoring, code navigation, debugging, and testing
- Plugin ecosystem for extending language and framework support
- Cross-platform availability on Windows, macOS, and Linux
- Regular updates and advanced feature integration in Ultimate Edition (e.g., Java 25 early access, database editing)