The short answer: It depends on your projects, specific tasks, team, and personal preferences. But that said, most of the time, PhpStorm will be a superior choice.
Let’s take a look at some specific use cases.
If you are using frameworks such as Laravel or Symfony or CMSs like WordPress or Drupal, PhpStorm is the best choice because it has a very deep, native understanding of all of those platforms. It even provides extra plugins, too.
If you are a professional developer, you most likely use databases and version control. You can access both from PhpStorm. PhpStorm lets you see changes and make commits, browse your database, modify data, and run queries – all out of the box.
There are no projects that come without a frontend these days, and PhpStorm has got you covered here with support for JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, and many frameworks and tools, such as React.js, Vue.js, Next.js, and Tailwind CSS.
To help you ensure code quality, PhpStorm highlights errors in the editor and offers integration with many additional tools, such as PHP_CodeSniffer, PHPStan, Psalm, and more.
If you’re testing code, again you have PHPUnit and Pest support out of the box. You can run tests in PhPStorm, even in parallel, and enjoy a very quick fail-fix iteration loop.
Last but not least, if you’re lazy like me and want to fix bugs in code efficiently, there’s nothing better than using Xdebug. Set breakpoints anywhere in the code, run it, and then go step by step through the codebase to find out what’s happening in one run. There are too many possibilities and timesavers to list here, but you’ll discover them for yourself very quickly when you start using the debugger.
PhpStorm rolls out three major releases every year. It delivers the latest PHP version support even before it’s officially available, so that you can prepare your projects for upgrade ahead of time. And with the recently added AI Assistant, the horizon of possibilities has been extended dramatically.
In summary, the best tool is the one that works for you, but in the majority of cases, PhpStorm is going to come out on top.