I strongly prefer NetBeans to Eclipse. I haven't used IntelliJ, but would like to.
The big feature of NetBeans is simply that it's fully-integrated. Out of the box, it works with Maven, Subversion, Mercurial, etc. Comes with Tomcat and HSQL so you can deploy your web apps from within the IDE. It requires far less setup and just generally "does the right thing" without really requiring me to make a bunch of decisions and install a ton of plugins. With Eclipse I never managed to make any of that stuff work; there are many different plugins you'll find for any given task by searching, and many of them have plugin dependencies or are outdated or just suck. My time is too valuable to spend it making Eclipse into the one IDE to rule them all. I have not been disappointed by NetBeans, and three of my coworkers have switched to it since I've been there, I suspect because they got tired of configuring Eclipse.
Just my two cents. I'm sure a lot of what I gripe about is "easy" to do, and I certainly would admit that more is possible with Eclipse, but the tradeoff just doesn't seem worth it to me.
I strongly prefer NetBeans to Eclipse. I haven't used IntelliJ, but would like to.
I have used IntelliJ and I far prefer Netbeans from 6.7 on. I suspect a lot of people used an older version of Netbeans but after 6.7 it is probably the most well integrated IDE available for Java as well as an assortment of other languages.
Someone said the Javascript support was better in IntelliJ product and I just don't see that, Netbeans has better support for Javascript than ever Aptana Studio as well it supports the syntax of all of the major JS Toolkits from Dojo to jQuery.
Netbeans rivals Visual Studio when it comes to an well integrated environment that provides UI's for SQL / DB managment, HTML, CSS, XML, JSON, Server managment and is the first IDE that I did not feel like I was roughing it in since coming back to Java from doing some .NET work for a couple of years.
The big feature of NetBeans is simply that it's fully-integrated. Out of the box, it works with Maven, Subversion, Mercurial, etc. Comes with Tomcat and HSQL so you can deploy your web apps from within the IDE. It requires far less setup and just generally "does the right thing" without really requiring me to make a bunch of decisions and install a ton of plugins. With Eclipse I never managed to make any of that stuff work; there are many different plugins you'll find for any given task by searching, and many of them have plugin dependencies or are outdated or just suck. My time is too valuable to spend it making Eclipse into the one IDE to rule them all. I have not been disappointed by NetBeans, and three of my coworkers have switched to it since I've been there, I suspect because they got tired of configuring Eclipse.
Just my two cents. I'm sure a lot of what I gripe about is "easy" to do, and I certainly would admit that more is possible with Eclipse, but the tradeoff just doesn't seem worth it to me.