Bluefish vs NuSphere PhpED
Bluefish
bluefish.sourceforge.io
NuSphere PhpED
nusphere.comSide by side
| Figure | Bluefish | NuSphere PhpED |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · PHP IDEs | 8.1 (#10) | 8.0 (#13) |
| Platforms | The project says Bluefish runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD; installers are listed for Linux distributions, macOS, and 64-bit Windows. | PhpED is offered for Windows; NuSphere describes running it on Mac or Linux using Wine or Parallels, with some IDE functions unavailable under Wine. |
| Security | The project page describes the Flatpak build's strict security restrictions but does not state a security certification or compliance standard. | The features page says debugger communications use TLS 1.3 and certificate-authenticated debugger access is available to PRO customers only. |
| Support | Community and support are volunteer-run through a mailing list and bug tracker; the project says commercial support can be requested by contacting its project manager. | The Professional license includes one year of web-based technical support and free upgrades to major versions; the Personal license includes one year of upgrades and updates. |
Plans
NuSphere PhpED
- PhpED Personal$81, paid once
- PhpED Professional$129, paid once
- PhpED Team4$387, paid once
In their own words
Bluefish
Bluefish is a free, open-source desktop editor for programmers and web developers writing websites, scripts and programming code. It runs on Linux, macOS and Windows and supports more than 30 markup and programming languages. The multi-document interface can open 1,000 or more documents, with more than 10,000 tested simultaneously. Editing tools include regular-expression search and replace, code folding, auto-completion and automatic tag closing. Project support restores settings for each project. Through gvfs, Bluefish works with remote files over FTP, SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, WebDAV, CIFS and other protocols. Users can connect external programs such as make, lint, weblint, xmllint, tidy and javac, or run custom programs and scripts. The Flatpak build has strict security restrictions that block integration with some system tools and the web browser, although internal functionality works. Community support is volunteer-run through a mailing list and bug tracker. Bluefish is released under the GNU GPL license.
NuSphere PhpED
NuSphere PhpED is an integrated development environment for PHP, HTML, CSS, XML, Smarty, XHTML, and other languages on Linux, macOS, and Windows. The editor supports PHP 5.3–8.4 with syntax highlighting, code folding, Unicode editing, search, and a diff viewer. Its debugger handles local and remote sessions, breakpoints, call stacks, variables, and parallel debugging. Performance Explorer offers sampling-based timeline, call-tree, flame-graph, and stack-chart views, alongside line-level profiling. Deployment supports FTP, FTPS, SSH/SFTP, WebDAV, and Windows Share. The database client works with SQLite, MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and InterBase. Integrations include PHPUnit, jQuery, extJS, Tortoise SVN, Tortoise CVS, PHP Documentor, HTML Tidy, Code Formatter, HTML Validator, and a CVS client. NuSphere offers a free, fully functional 14-day PhpED 23.0 trial. Personal costs $81, paid once, Professional $129, paid once, and Team4 $387, paid once for four licenses. Professional includes one year of support and major-version upgrades.