I recently have been working on a Python programming project and I wanted to point out the differences between the Pycharm community edition vs the paid addition. I want to start out by saying that I think Pycharm is the best Python editor on the market. While I like VSCode, Pycharm makes the virtual environment for you and loads the plugins for you rather than having to do all that manually in VSCode. But VSCode has one advantage over Pycharm it’s entirely free and while the Pycharm community edition is free it’s not totally functional.
Pycharm community edition lets you code apps using PyQT, PyGTK, and Tkinter so basically any kind of desktop app for free but if you want to code anything using web frameworks like Django or Flask you need to have Pycharm Professional. Pycharm community edition does not include any web framework platform editing.
Pycharm Community Edition as far as web development only supports HTML, XML, YAML, JSON, and RelaxNG while Pycharm Professional supports many others including remote development tools like Docker, SSH, and FTP. Both versions free and paid support Github.
One of the things that really personally annoyed me was the support for SQL. You can use SQLite on which is supported by Python but to use other free database tools like PostgreSQL or MySQL you need Pycharm Professional. I could understand that for Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle SQL but not PostgreSQL or MySQL which are free and open-source for everyone. Even Microsoft and Oracle offer express versions that are free why do you need the pro version to access and modify free databases.
If you are just learning Python I think Pycharm Community edition is great it’s fast and creates a Virtual Environment for you every time it makes it easy. While I do think that community edition is great if you are going to be doing any real project work I strongly recommend buying the Pycharm Professional at 8 dollars a month it’s worth the cost for anyone who is serious about development it’s a great tool and I recommend it to anyone working with Python.