What is the difference between Eclipse with Spring IDE plugin and Spring Tool Suite alone?

Question

What's the difference between these

• Eclipse with the Spring IDE plugin
• Spring Tool Suite (STS) alone

I ask because STS says it's built on top of Eclipse, and I wonder what differences it has over simply using a plugin that adds similar functionality to "vanilla" Eclipse.

Answer 1

It's true, STS is built on top of Eclipse. The difference is only related to another products support from the STS installation, like Roo, Pivotal tc Server, Cloud Foundry and getting started guides, but you could also include this features in your Eclipse installation.

So STS gives a complete solution around Spring features and simplifies the developer environment install, that's the key difference.

As Martin Lippert explains in the forums:

"So you can end-up having the same features in STS and your existing Eclipse installation after installing the STS features into it."

You could find more details on the Spring forums.

Details on features: STS features and Spring IDE plugin features.

Answer 2

Spring Tool suite has ready to go features specially designed to spring supported projects and cloud environment. And Eclipse is more generic where we've to add the plugins and extensions for our platform setup.