--- title: Brackets Reviews meta_title: 'Brackets Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 262 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Brackets works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.4 review_count: 262 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-08-09' parent_category: name: Editor url: https://www.g2.com/categories/editor --- # Brackets Reviews **Vendor:** Adobe **Category:** [Text Editor Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/text-editor) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 262 ## About Brackets Brackets is a modern, open-source code editor specifically designed for web development, focusing on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Developed by Adobe and released in 2014, Brackets is built using web technologies, making it lightweight and highly extensible. It is cross-platform, supporting macOS, Windows, and Linux operating systems. Brackets offers a range of features tailored to enhance the web development workflow. Key Features and Functionality: - Inline Editors: Brackets allows developers to open a window into the code they care about most, enabling quick edits without switching between file tabs. - Live Preview: This feature provides a real-time connection to the browser, allowing developers to see changes to CSS and HTML instantly on screen. - Preprocessor Support: Brackets offers support for preprocessors, facilitating a more efficient workflow for developers who use them. - Extensibility: Being open-source, Brackets supports a wide range of extensions that add functionality such as Git integration, Emmet for high-speed HTML and CSS workflow, and more. Primary Value and User Solutions: Brackets addresses the needs of web developers by providing a streamlined, efficient coding environment that integrates visual tools directly into the editor. Features like Live Preview and Inline Editors reduce the need to switch between different applications, thereby enhancing productivity. Its open-source nature and extensibility allow developers to customize the editor to fit their specific workflow, making it a versatile tool for modern web development. ## Brackets Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users appreciate the **ease of use** in Brackets, enjoying its intuitive interface and helpful features for coding. (3 reviews) - Users love the **live preview** feature in Brackets, making web development faster and more efficient. (3 reviews) - Users love the **easy integrations** with browsers, enhancing their workflow during website development and editing. (2 reviews) - Users benefit from the **enhanced productivity** that Brackets offers through its intuitive features and fast environment. (2 reviews) - Users enjoy the **fast and intuitive interface** of Brackets, enhancing their front-end coding experience significantly. (2 reviews) - Users value the **usefulness of extensions** in Brackets for quick and lightweight features, enhancing their coding experience. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **rich selection of extensions** in Brackets, enhancing their coding experience and productivity. (1 reviews) - File Compatibility (1 reviews) - Free (1 reviews) - Large File Handling (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find **plugin navigation challenging** , often struggling with a cluttered store and unsupported extensions. (2 reviews) - Users experience **crashes with Live Preview** and note a decline in support and updates for Brackets. (1 reviews) - Users note a **lack of IDE features** in Brackets, leading to limitations in functionality and support for modern frameworks. (1 reviews) - Users find the **poor interface design** frustrating, making navigation and extension management more difficult than necessary. (1 reviews) - Users express concern over **discontinued support** for Brackets, negatively impacting reliability and ongoing usage. (1 reviews) - Users report **update issues** with Brackets, leading to crashes and lack of support for modern frameworks. (1 reviews) ## Brackets Reviews ### 1. Brackets for web development **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mayuresh K. | Tools Management Sr. Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 10, 2021 **What do you like best about Brackets?** Live preview of code changes is the best benefit. Intellisense available for most language which helps code faster. **What do you dislike about Brackets?** Takes too long to start. Live preview crashes sometimes. **Recommendations to others considering Brackets:** Brackets is a good editor fir web development projects. **What problems is Brackets solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using it extensively for web development. It can handle large projects without crashing. Live preview helps in reviewing the UI changes instantly. ### 2. Open source Text Editor **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shane R. | Sodtware Developer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 19, 2019 **What do you like best about Brackets?** Live updates preview is a lovely feature implmenetd by brackets and which I use a lot. Sometimes I actually wonder why other text editors like sublime text and atom never thought of implementing the feature before. It allows you to see in real time the changes you've made to your file on the browser without manually click reload or hitting 'Ctlr + R' / F5 all the time. There is also another feature called Quick Edit that allows you to style a tag within the html file without having to switch over to the css file. This is also accompanied with incredible support for css processors like SASS and LESS. Most front end developers and even backend developers who are looking to make a quick UI for their application prefer to use preprocessors instead of plain old css to create styles. Because it is built by html5 and javascript and bundled using electronJS, Brackets is easily hackable to any front end developer and hence can be easily extended to support more functionality than it was intended for. **What do you dislike about Brackets?** The problem with most desktop applications built using electronjs is that the memory management on them is really poor and brackets is no exception to this common phenomenon. To make matters worse, Adobe, who are the makers of Brackets, are famous for making applications that are memory intensive and which are not kind to lowly specified devices. Brackets in particular has an extended load time and can sometimes get buggy when running. **Recommendations to others considering Brackets:** This application will heavily influence your work if you're particularly a frontend web developer. I wouldn't suggest it for backend designs though. **What problems is Brackets solving and how is that benefiting you?** As someone who focuses mainly on the backend, sometimes I need to quickly come up with a front end to verify that my application actually works as intended. I use brackets whenever these needs arise to create html and css files. ### 3. Apt for web front end technologies **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brian K. | UI/UX Designer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 18, 2019 **What do you like best about Brackets?** Brackets is text editor that prioritises user interface designs and the technologies used in that regard. I believe this is because it's parent company, Adobe, is primarily known for design tools. One of its amazin features is preview on hover where when you hover on color names or hexcodes, you get a preview of what the colour looks like without having to switch back to the browser to confirm. This feature also applies to images where when you hover over an image path within your html or css code, you get a preview of the image so you are certain that you've correctly linked the image. Still on previews, Brackets has a standout Live Preview feature that allows you to see all the changes you've made to your code on the fly on the browser without constantly having to reload the browser. This was one of the features that attracted me to it in my earlier days when I still didn't know how to create my own live server. This also goes to speak to its friendliness to beginner devs. **What do you dislike about Brackets?** In line with my title, Brackets is not very dependable for working on backends and server side languages. In its earlier days, php, for instance, did not Get any syntax representation and it appeared as normal text. Now even though that has changes over time, support for such alnguages including ruby and python is still merely limited to syntax highlights only. **Recommendations to others considering Brackets:** Remeber that the main focus of brackets is front end web technologies like javascript, html and css, and their libraries and any other usecase will only give you a lot of frustrations. **What problems is Brackets solving and how is that benefiting you?** - Brackets is secondary text editor to me that I mainly use whenever a project only has a front end and there are no backend implementations required ### 4. Great tool for coding exercises **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Edward O. | Database Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 13, 2019 **What do you like best about Brackets?** In my opinion what sets Brackets apart from most of the other text editors is the Live Preview feature where you only have to click the button and your files get served on your browser (uses a chrome instance) while mimicking server features so that you don't have to worry that there will be a difference when your site goes live. There is also a readily accessible extensions manager that can be used to access the plugins page so as to get more functionailty into the code editor. It supports not just dragging and dropping of text but even multiline and rectangular selection and editing. **What do you dislike about Brackets?** Live Preview may be a very outstanding feature but it is very limited in functionality. It can't configure and read the backend language files such as php together with database connections. This makes Brackets only ideal for front-end development and very annoying to use to develop the backend for web applications. **Recommendations to others considering Brackets:** Brackets should be used mostly to develop the front-end of your applications and if you use it for any other instances you might not get the best out of it. **What problems is Brackets solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our company runs on several technology stacks ranging from our website to tools such as empoyee attendance management, billing systems, customer support systems etc. These applications need to stay updated all the time aand it is our responsibility as the IT team to do so. This is thus how I specifically use Brackts because I need multiple text editors since I'm always working on different projects at the same time and need to keep the working files and settings on each editor as they are. ### 5. Functional editor, innovative but disappointing in many aspects **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Fabrizio C. | Senior Provisioning engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 17, 2019 **What do you like best about Brackets?** I'll start by saying that Brackets, from the first installation and first launch, aims and proves to be more of an editor for web developers than for system administrators, configuration provisioning, and scripting. However, I tried and used it for about 4 months, continuously updating it to the latest stable versions released almost monthly. It weighs 60 MB, but once running, it requires considerable and continuous resources to smoothly use a decent number of features, even simple ones like find and replace using regular expressions. This aspect did not deter me, but from recent versions, it no longer natively supports YAML and additional markup and markdown languages except through external extensions, making it and itself unusable for editing Linux configurations, Ansible (RedHat), netplan, and similar operations. **What do you dislike about Brackets?** Despite being 60 MB, it requires high and continuous hardware resources compared to other source code editors (some even more functional and performant), it does not natively support collaborative editing and is unable to interpret, suggest autocompletion, and perform syntax highlighting for some configuration languages structured in markup and markdown recently introduced in the Linux and Ubuntu world. **What problems is Brackets solving and how is that benefiting you?** I haven't encountered any particular problems with Brackets; it's a very simple source code editor that performs its job quite well without freezing or crashing. It has been useful to me for the occasional modification of HTML and CSS source code of a web page related to the front-end of a panel that needs to be customized with company logos. I found the native real-time live preview on the default browser to be really useful and well done. ### 6. A bare minimum toll for front end development **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Grace M. | UI/UX Designer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 07, 2019 **What do you like best about Brackets?** Brackets is able to achieve the simplicity as experienced on Notepad++ without losing core functionality such as expected in an IDE. It has an amazing plugins page from which you can find thousands of plugins that you can use to extend its functionality and thus achieve more in your User Interface development process. I also find Brackets' live preview one of the most direct features in an editor. It is just a one click process and I don't have to go around installing a webserver and creating node tests for running the server. **What do you dislike about Brackets?** Brackets may support syntax for backend languages such as PHP and python but that's just as far as it can go for languages that are not UI based. Whereas it is good that an editor chooses to focus on just one element of web development, this is not convenient for fullstack developers because you would have to use another code editor to develop the backend of your application **Recommendations to others considering Brackets:** If you are exclusively a UI designer then Brackets is going to fit rightly in your path as a developer so I wholeheartedly suggest that you give it a chance **What problems is Brackets solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Brackets priamrily when design simple UI elements that only require CSS and javascript to a limited extent. I find Brackets quite useful for these stages of development because I don't have to tinker around with package.json files and any other kind of file ### 7. Should you use Brackets!? **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kolton G. | Chief Technology Officer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 17, 2019 **What do you like best about Brackets?** What I liked the best about using Brackets is the integration it has with Photoshop. That was the number one feature as well as the page interactivity. **What do you dislike about Brackets?** The biggest issue I have with Brackets is the performance of it when working in a bigger code set and the lack of an extension marketplace. **What problems is Brackets solving and how is that benefiting you?** Brackets solved the issue of UI mocks being different than HTML, CSS UI's built. The tools that are built-in helps make sure that whatever the designer designs are built during development. ### 8. Low barrier to entry text editor for markup **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 17, 2019 **What do you like best about Brackets?** I like that Brackets is low barrier to entry and very lightweight. It requires minimal configuration to be productive in HTML, CSS **What do you dislike about Brackets?** It has limited tooling in comparison with heavier weight text editors like VS Code, Sublime, Atom so I never used it for development work. I used it for markup (HTML, CSS) **Recommendations to others considering Brackets:** Use this for markup not for development **What problems is Brackets solving and how is that benefiting you?** It has limited tooling in comparison with heavier weight text editors like VS Code, Sublime, Atom so I had problems using it for development work. ### 9. For Front end development, Brackets is as user friendly as it gets **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Greg G. | Product Manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2018 **What do you like best about Brackets?** Brackets has this sort of built-in CSS manager. It lets you go through your html file and right click on classes (or cmd click, I believe) to open up that class in the related CSS file. it's really great **What do you dislike about Brackets?** Beyond front end development, I don't love it. I much prefer using VS Code for other things. For basic web development, though, I really can't complain. **Recommendations to others considering Brackets:** Use it for front end dev work - it is great. For back end or things that may be a bit more involved, consider VS Code. Both are free, there is no reason you shouldn't try both. **What problems is Brackets solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am not sure if I'd consider it a problem. I think I use it as a tool and I suppose that solves problems, but it is more of a vitamin than a pill. It enhances my front end dev work, but not much else. ### 10. Brackets a good text editor for HTML & CSS **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 11, 2018 **What do you like best about Brackets?** Brackets has some interesting features for me: With Brackets we can see the changes that we make in real time without reloading the browser. Other feature is that Brackets shows a pop-up with the previsualization for colors and images in css. Autocomplete for HTML tags and CSS attributes. It has many plugins to improve your user experience, such as the emmet plugin or plugins for SASS. **What do you dislike about Brackets?** Tthe least I like is that it is a text editor oriented to HTML and CSS, if you want to use it for PHP or Javascript there are better options. **Recommendations to others considering Brackets:** If you only write in HTML or CSS it is a great option due to its specific features. **What problems is Brackets solving and how is that benefiting you?** The benefits that Brackets gives me is speed when writing in HTML and CSS, I save time when writing HTML and CSS code. ### 11. (Almost) the best text editor for programmers **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alvaro S. | Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 11, 2018 **What do you like best about Brackets?** It is very practical, supports many languages, easy to edit with it, marks the code by colors correctly and allows the use of extensions. I recommend it to edit but not for very extensive projects. **What do you dislike about Brackets?** Folder management and searches are somewhat complicated in this editor, so I do not recommend it for large projects **Recommendations to others considering Brackets:** Not recommended for big projects/programs **What problems is Brackets solving and how is that benefiting you?** Creation of subprograms or small tools, or correction of errors and bugs. ### 12. Not the Best - But Not the Worst Either **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Raj T. | Grader CSCI:109 Introduction to Computer Science, Higher Education, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 26, 2018 **What do you like best about Brackets?** The Project Management is nicely handled in Brackets! **What do you dislike about Brackets?** After using Sublime Text and Notepad++, you wouldn't quite use Brackets! Others are just so much better **Recommendations to others considering Brackets:** Probably if you are a Naive Developer, go for it. Else, Meh! **What problems is Brackets solving and how is that benefiting you?** Developing Websites HTML-CSS-JavaScript-PhP. ### 13. Aesthetically Pleasing IDE **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Abraham S. | Owner, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 14, 2016 **What do you like best about Brackets?** I was quite surprised that adobe produced a reasonable IDE that I could stand to work in, and open source too! It has all the features one comes to expect from a web-centric IDE. Things like live preview, LESS and Sass support, live previewing, and lots more. **What do you dislike about Brackets?** This IDE met my approval overall and I had no memorable dislikes. **Recommendations to others considering Brackets:** If you're looking for a decent balance between minimalism, functionality, and aesthetics in your web development IDE, Brackets is definitely worth a look. **What problems is Brackets solving and how is that benefiting you?** This IDE has become one of several which I recommend to other developers. Being lightweight and simple (or more accurately having a subtle interface), it is a fun IDE with which to work. I even recommend it to the beginning developers who I help train. ### 14. Good code editor **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Moch. Faisal R. | Full Stack Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 26, 2017 **What do you like best about Brackets?** Clean interface and have many plugins that compatible with brackets to make easy developing mostly javascript and node.js **What do you dislike about Brackets?** Sidebar that consume many space and also not highlighting the same word. **Recommendations to others considering Brackets:** Brackets suitable to use for developing HTML and CSS also javascript. Easy to use and also clean interface. **What problems is Brackets solving and how is that benefiting you?** Developing website. ## Brackets Discussions - [Hoe to change the dark theme background](https://www.g2.com/discussions/12642-hoe-to-change-the-dark-theme-background) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [Is there a shortcut or simple way to auto format code within Brackets?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/29397-is-there-a-shortcut-or-simple-way-to-auto-format-code-within-brackets) - 1 comment - [View Brackets pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/brackets/reviews?filters%5Bnps_score%5D%5B%5D=3§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-08-12+11%3A20%3A00+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=2957d9af-a39c-4867-aa50-ba8ce1507b6f&secure%5Btoken%5D=4027db24ed752032337cf15e8b9c535b2b546cf3194c4d58ae3f7f01d6e93f34&format=llm_user) ## Brackets Integrations - [Apple Safari](https://www.g2.com/products/apple-safari/reviews) - [Chrome OS](https://www.g2.com/products/chrome-os/reviews) - [Mozilla Firefox](https://www.g2.com/products/mozilla-firefox/reviews) ## Brackets Features **Coding** - Syntax highlighting - Autocompletion - Find and replace - Code folding **Editing** - Collaborative editing - Language Support - Selection Methods **Functionality** - Extensibility - Cross-platform support - Plugins and integrations - Security **Agentic AI - Landing Page Builders** - Cross-system Integration ## Top Brackets Alternatives - [Visual Studio Code](https://www.g2.com/products/visual-studio-code/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (2,658 reviews) - [Notepad++](https://www.g2.com/products/notepad/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (2,413 reviews) - [Sublime Text](https://www.g2.com/products/sublime-text/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (1,749 reviews)