This guide walks you through different aspects and capabilities of collaborative coding tools to help you decide which one will be a perfect fit for your team.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Remote development is clearly here to stay, and when you need to collaborate with your team, starting a Zoom meeting or Hangout (er… Google meeting) is probably something you think of doing first. However, several developer-focused solutions that are much better suited for remote development are available today — but how do you know which one to pick? This guide will help you make that decision. As you read this guide, you might wonder how I know an awful lot about these solutions. The fact is, I work for Genuitec, which makes CodeTogether. What you see below is the result of our continuing study of this landscape to see how we stack up against our competitors and to decide what we need to focus on next. This guide aims to be factual, and in an effort to remain unbiased, I do not delve too deeply into the quality or capabilities of each feature. While the vast majority of remote pair programming tools are IDE-based, there are a few that are based around screen sharing. While Webex and GoToMeeting are known for being CPU intensive, these new screen-sharing solutions are more performant and flexible. For instance, they support higher quality video and multiple cursors, making them more suitable for use when sharing an IDE. Examples of screen sharing solutions include Drovio (formerly UseTogether), Tuple, and CoScreen. However, nothing changes the fact that everyone in the session can only focus on one piece of code at a time — they can’t explore other areas of the code-base, run independent analysis, or make changes elsewhere. They have to be familiar with the IDE the host is using, and if the host jumps to another application, everyone loses access to the code. These fundamental screen-sharing constraints make true collaboration with such solutions impractical. This guide will therefore focus only on IDE-based solutions. In this guide, we’ll look at what IDEs they’re compatible with, how secure they are, how capable the guests’ development experience is, additional features like audio/video calling, and finish up with a pricing comparison. Perhaps the easiest way to narrow down your choices is to check to see if the IDEs are supported by the tool. Every developer wants to use their preferred IDE because they’re familiar with the layouts, themes, UI, and most importantly, key bindings. Does your entire team use just one IDE? Or are there more IDEs in the mix? Even when joining sessions, being able to use their favorite IDE would make a significant difference to a developer’s productivity. Being able to join sessions from a browser is also a benefit when a developer doesn’t have access to their work machine. Maybe they’re on vacation, sunbathing on a beach, but you don’t like their choice of words on the home page; got to get that fixed ASAP, right? Tool / IDE IntelliJ Eclipse VS Code Browser Code With Me ✔️ CodeTogether ✔️ Duckly ✔️ Floobits ➖ 1 ✔️ GitLive ✔️ Live Share ✔️ Saros ➖ 2 ➖ 3 1 Most recent release in October 2020, does not appear to be in active development.
