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🦉 WE READ 88 OWNER COMMENTS
JetBrains Fleet: what owners actually say
Owners found Fleet neither a compelling VS Code replacement nor a full IntelliJ alternative, and JetBrains is pulling the plug on it in December 2025.
What owners complain about
- Stuck between two worlds COMMON
Owners report Fleet isn't feature-complete enough to replace IntelliJ, and too different for VS Code users to switch. Multiple commenters say it 'doesn't really bring much compared to VSCode.'
- Being discontinued SOME
Fleet will no longer be available for download starting December 22, 2025. JetBrains is replacing it with a new product 'focused on agentic development,' which some users greeted with frustration.
- Confusing product positioning COMMON
Multiple users were confused about Fleet's relationship to IntelliJ IDEA — whether it replaces it, coexists, or is a new platform entirely. One commenter compared JetBrains' product lineup to 'Microsoft Windows syndrome: too many versions, almost all the same.'
- No plugin support SOME
Fleet did not support custom non-bundled plugins for a long time. Users had to manually download zips and copy folders to install anything. Even later, the extensibility model remained unclear.
- Proprietary and resource-heavy SOME
Users lamented that unlike IntelliJ Community Edition (permissively licensed), Fleet is proprietary. JetBrains' resource consumption was repeatedly called out as excessive.
What owners love
- Seamless remote development
Some owners reported they 'couldn't really notice that it was running remotely,' praising the thin-client architecture where the IDE core runs on a server and can be disabled when not needed.
- Top-tier refactoring inherited from JetBrains
Owners emphasize that refactoring across JetBrains products is 'infinitely better' than VS Code and call it 'an insane productivity boost.'
- Smart design philosophy
Users appreciated that JetBrains didn't mindlessly clone VS Code but cherry-picked the core reasons it succeeded, including cloud coding environments and language server protocol support.
Surprising patterns
- Some owners who tried Fleet ended up switching to Zed, saying they only need two IDEs: a full one like IntelliJ and something that opens JSON files in under a second.
- Despite JetBrains' reputation for heavy tooling, users saw Fleet's distributed architecture as potentially solving resource consumption by running the IDE core on a server.
- Long-time JetBrains subscribers are dropping the ecosystem entirely, citing years-old unfixed bugs and new features that 'often just don't work at all,' not because of Fleet specifically but because of broader quality concerns.
WHO SHOULD SKIP IT
Anyone looking for a long-term lightweight editor investment — Fleet is being discontinued, and current users report it lacks both the VS Code plugin ecosystem and the IntelliJ feature depth.
Synthesised from 88 real owner comments across 4 platforms. Every point is grounded in the comments — no marketing, no AI guessing. How we do it →