How did I miss this?

For years I paid for the JetBrains All Products Pack — the whole suite, every IDE they make. Then I worked out I'd been buying a box of separate tools when one tool with the right plugins did the entire job. Hence the title.

The trap I fell into

JetBrains sells a dedicated IDE per language: PhpStorm for PHP, CLion for C/C++ and Rust, PyCharm for Python, GoLand, WebStorm, RubyMine, DataGrip — and the All Products Pack to scoop up the lot. I'd convinced myself each one was uniquely tuned to its language, so naturally I needed all of them. PhpStorm "just worked" for Laravel the moment I opened it. CLion "felt right" for Rust. Of course I kept the full pack — look at everything I get.

The bit I'd missed

They are all the same IDE. IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate is the platform underneath every one of them. The language-specific IDEs are essentially IntelliJ with a curated set of plugins pre-installed and the rest left out. Drop the PHP plugin into IntelliJ Ultimate and you have, functionally, PhpStorm — same editor, same refactoring, same inspections, same debugger, because it is literally the same application.

"But PhpStorm is perfect out of the box"

It is — because someone pre-ticked the PHP plugin and a couple of companions for you. That is the whole of the difference. The "out of the box" magic I was paying a premium for was a checkbox I could tick myself in thirty seconds. IntelliJ Ultimate plus the PHP plugin is PhpStorm.

"And CLion is the Rust IDE"

I was certain CLion was where Rust belonged. But the Rust support I actually valued was the IntelliJ Rust plugin, which dropped happily into IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate just the same. (JetBrains has since spun Rust out into its own RustRover, which is a separate story — but the lesson held: the thing I thought was baked into CLion was a plugin all along.)

What I do now

One install: IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate. I add the plugins for whatever I'm actually touching — PHP, Python, Go — and I get one IDE, one set of keybindings, one settings sync, for every project. The real win is polyglot work: a Laravel backend with a bit of Go tooling alongside it lives in a single window now, instead of me alt-tabbing between two near-identical IDEs that don't share a thing. And Ultimate on its own is a fraction of the All Products Pack price.

When a dedicated IDE still earns its keep

To be fair: the dedicated IDEs ship sensible defaults, the odd exclusive feature, and zero setup. If you live in exactly one language and never leave it, grabbing the purpose-built IDE is completely reasonable. But the moment you touch more than one language, IntelliJ Ultimate plus a few plugins is the same engine for less money and far less context-switching.

I could have saved so much money. The All Products Pack was insurance against a problem I never had — needing five separate apps when one configurable one would do. How did I miss this for so long?