For TypeScript there's little difference since most of TypeScript support comes from the same language server running in the background (there's an option in the menus to restart it if it breaks, same as in vscode).

Although autocomplete is better (especially for pure JS), it doesn't warrant paying for a license IMHO. Personally, I use IDEA for TS because I use it for other languages where it blows everything else out of the water (so muscle memory).

Also, if you're doing server-side development, it has a very good built-in client for two dozen databases (which pretty much replicates the functionality of their DataGrip product), so you get decent data editing / import / export / DDL support, and excellent autocompletion for your SQL (interspersed among TS code, or not — doesn't matter).

Edit: also, 100% of their products' funtionality can be used from keyboard. I don't touch the mouse at all. I think vscode can support something like that, but with very heavy customization (and even then I'm not sure). Out of the box it pretty much forces you to use the mouse for many things.

Their support is also often stellar - if something breaks in a free product, get ready for some free support also (read, none, DIY).

And, maybe you think fixing your IDE yourself makes you a better developer - if you are building IDEs, maybe, sure. I'm more than happy to outsource that a company which does this as its bread and butter.

Microsoft, on the other hand, sells (or tries to) enterprise office solutions. They may have optimized for a single use-case (TypeScript), outside of promoting their web-strategy (typescript), I wouldn't expect them to care one lick about VSCode, once it stops being particularly important.

Its also not open source (VSCode), so I would have no qualms regarding that - there is (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode) OFC but the license for the product everyone uses is not (https://code.visualstudio.com/License/). Similar story for Jetbrains - https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/idea/ is open source while of course IntelliJ, Webstorm are not (https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/idea/)

I write a bit of TypeScript recently in both VSCode and WebStorm, I also have many years of experience using both tools. Started with VSCode since it lightweight and this is what I use to edit most of the text. Unfortunately VSCode had troubles indexing the project, refactoring, figuring out types and navigating between methods. Everything works but VSCode hangs for a few seconds every time I do an action that needs a code analysis e.g. go to a method definition. Most of the time it was faster to search and replace rather than to rename a method. WebStorm was the opposite - opens in a few seconds, but then everything works instantly.

While I use it for TS/Vue projects, my main experience of differences is with C# and Java, so I’m afraid I can’t.

I mean for Java. IntelliJ is made for Java. If you want to do Python, Jetbrains (the creator of IntelliJ) made PyCharm. For Javascript, they made Webstorm.