The following answer[1] was 2012 but I think it's still applicable. Basically, the plugins to IDEA are always a few months behind the dedicated products (Webstorm, Pycharm, Rubymine, etc). If you always want the bleeding edge latest & greatest, the plugins may not meet your needs.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13827214/can-intellij-ide...

I have a pycharm license, eventually got a rubymine license when I started working on ruby as well. Lately, I've been using Sublime because it's been annoying me having to spin up a completely different IDE to get some code in another language done. I regret not just paying the $199 for IntelliJ. FWIW; I'm an infrastructure engineer and deal with a pretty wide variety of languages, my daily use case could likely be less common for most developers.

I'd happily pay $10-20/mo or something for full blown Intellij. Not sure why they haven't changed their model.

The plugins for IntelliJ usually wind up a few weeks to months behind, so that's another big reason that I bought the individual language apps.

While you can do most things in IntelliJ, they are often a step or two removed. It is often much nicer to just use the language specific IDE except for times when you need to be going cross-language in a project.

My usual advice is that if you are very familiar with IDEs and have used them in the past than using IntelliJ with plugins might be okay. Otherwise use the individual products.

IntelliJ can do almost everything the other IDEs can do, but since the others target one programming environment or language they tend to be easier to use for that environment.

If you're happy with a single IDE then it's fine. However, please note that IntelliJ IDEA does not include CLion, AppCode and of course none of the .NET tools.

IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate doesn't include App Code or any of the C-family language products and unlike Ruby and Python there aren't plug-ins available for that either.