Sublime VS. Atom: Will GitHub's Text Editor Beat The Standing Champion? | Takipi Blog
8. Community
Sublime has a huge following of users with hundreds of questions each month on StackOverflow, countless blog posts on any feature by power users, recommended workflows and packages (Even a quite good unofficial newsletter) – mostly pushed by the users themselves with little to non official involvement. Official platforms are quite hard to maintain considering Sublime is mostly a one-person show. Check out this recent post confirming it is still alive and kicking despite the lack of communication.
It's interesting to spot the differences on this front between Sublime and Atom, whose still taking its first steps. However, since Atom is open-source, backed by GitHub, and developed on it, everything looks modern, shiny and bright: From the website, through the discussion board (compared to Sublime's "oldschool" phpBB) to the presence and action on GitHub itself.
Bottom line: You're less likely to get lost with the established Sublime Text, but GitHub knows its stuff when it comes to community management and support.
9. Pricing
Atom is open-source and free under the MIT license while Sublime costs $70 per user (This includes the long awaited version 3 update). There are no differences between the paid and free Sublime versions, apart from getting the "unregistered" status off and losing an occasional pop-up screen. Also, the Sublime Text 3 beta is available publicly, but the latest build is for registered users only. That said, $70 for a practically independent developer with an awesome product actually seems alright as a token of appreciation.
Bottom line: Atom is free, Sublime is "Winrar free".
10. A note about the release cycle
This is a short one, take one quick look at Sublime's release notes compared to Atom's release notes. You'll see that Atom is going ahead full throttle with new weekly releases while Sublime's are far and in between. In fact, Atom probably already had more releases in its short lifespan than Sublime had since its inception.
Bottom line: When it comes to new releases and bug fixes Sublime is unbelievably slow, while Atom is moving super fast.
So what's the final verdict?
It's great to see a new major player in the text editors landscape, especially a web based one. This challenges some basic concepts and gets the conversation going – Always a good thing. Is this a fair "fight" with Sublime's Jon Skinner and GitHub's octocat army? Sublime is the undisputed champion with a huge community and it will always have better performance. Although if Atom's performance issues will not push users away – Sublime better speed up the release cycle, brush up its small UX tweaks, and consider letting in more contributors because it looks like this is where Atom may finally have the upper hand.
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