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NetBeans vs Oracle SQL Developer comparison

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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 September 2026, in the IDE category, the mindshare of NetBeans is 4.9%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle SQL Developer is 7.1%, up from 4.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IDE Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Oracle SQL Developer7.1%
NetBeans4.9%
Other88.0%
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

"Setup is very simple and short, and integrating existing code and projects is also very simple."
"The learning curve is easy and fast because the interface is simple and intuitive, enabling us to easily train developers who are not expert in metrics."
"One of the most important features is that Apache Maven supports it."
"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."
"It is easy to deploy, manage servers, and ORMS resources."
"Use it and you will not regret your decision."
"Server Support"
"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."
"When I measure the amount of time for the same query to run on three different tools, Oracle SQL Developer leads the charts, and on average, if it takes around ten minutes on SQL Server, it takes roughly five to six minutes on Oracle SQL Developer, saving us nearly half an hour to one hour a day."
"License is free, setup is simple and scriptable."
"It's an independent platform, you can use it anywhere, it's good, scalable and a lot of times it works as-is, with very few calls to support."
"Customer service has been most excellent."
"You do not have to install it, just dump it on the OS, then use it."
"It's free and very user-friendly."
"The solution I've created is revenue forecasting and our organization goes to Wall Street with the earnings call, with the forecast."
 

Cons

"The debugging mechanize could be improved compared to IntelliJ, for example."
"The background scanning of projects should be optimized after starting NetBeans."
"Debugging: Watches, Evaluate Expression, and data inspection are limited."
"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."
"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."
"The GUI ‘navigator’ screen uses different icons for partitioned, indexed organised tables, temporary and of course conventional tables, but this is not the case with indexes in the viewer - they all look the same so you can’t tell if it is a bitmap index, a unique index, a partitioned index or what."
"While working with Data Pump, I have faced a few problems."
"Versioning is there, check. But it sucks a lot, double check."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"They were not supportive. I didn't get a solution."
"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 crashes compared to other tools such as DBeaver or Microsoft SQL Server."
 

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."
"NetBeans is free and open source."
"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'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."
"It's a no-cost license and it offers outstanding functionality on that basis."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
16%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Comms Service Provider
15%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
 

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

Ask a question
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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: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.