There are a variety of differences and similarities between the Eclipse and NetBeans development platforms as IDEs for Java development. Choice seems to largely be a matter of preference, as the feature sets are mostly convergent.

Project Similarities

Both tools are:

• Supported plugin model
• Java IDE with tons of bells and whistles
• Java 5 syntax support

Eclipse

Eclipse has a strong open source community following and plugin community.

• Directly supported by Eclipse Foundation, including IBM
• Strong plugin support from third parties
• SWT test bed
• Built and distributed on GCJ/Classpath by several Linux distros.

NetBeans

NetBeans has the direct support of Sun and has made strong efforts to be a competitive Java development platform to Eclipse.

• Directly supported by Sun
• Good J2EE/J2ME support
• Extras for integration with Solaris

• Features

  Official Netbeans Feature List(needs to be updated actually)

  http://www.netbeans.org/products/ide/features.html

• Community

  The main community site with many resources

  http://www.netbeans.org/community/index.html

• Documentation and Support

  Everything you do and don’t want to know

  http://www.netbeans.org/kb/index.html

• Why switch?

  propaganda on why you should switch

  http://www.netbeans.org/switch/

• Reviews

  More propaganda from the press

  http://www.netbeans.org/about/press/reviews

• Plugins commercial, community, and plugin repositories (there is also a link to community plugins under the community site)

  Writing plugins for Eclipse Users	http://www.netbeans.org/kb/50/netbeans-plugin-dev-for-eclipse-users.html
  Featured Plugin Catalog(needs to be updated and community plugins are listed under the community link)	http://www.netbeans.org/catalogue/index.html
  Spring plugin	http://spring-netbeans.sourceforge.net/
  SoapUI	http://www.soapui.org/netbeans/
  OpenOffice integeation	http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/OpenOffice_NetBeans_Integration
  Extremely large Netbeans plugin repo	http://www.nbextras.org/

• Partners (I personaly found this interesting)

  http://www.netbeans.org/community/partners/index.html

  http://www.netbeans.org/community/partners/list-community.html

  http://www.netbeans.org/community/partners/list-strategic.html

Opinions

• Nate: