Forrester Consulting Finds IntelliJ IDEA Delivered 155% ROI and Highlights Open Approach to AI

Forrester Consulting Finds IntelliJ IDEA Delivered 155% ROI and Highlights Open Approach to AI

We’re excited to share Forrester’s newly released Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study of IntelliJ IDEA, which JetBrains commissioned to understand how IntelliJ IDEA has delivered value historically and how it continues to do so.

Forrester interviewed nine senior engineering and technology leaders whose organizations have between 400 and 4,000 IntelliJ IDEA seats. Based on those interviews, it built a composite organization, a global financial services company with 2,000 developers, using IntelliJ IDEA.

Over three years, the composite organization saw:

• A 155% return on investment
• A net present value of $18.4 million
• $30.3 million in benefits against $11.9 million in costs (present value)
• Payback in nine months

The study highlighted IntelliJ IDEA’s impact on code quality, productivity (especially review time), and its open approach to AI, which allows developers to switch between models as their needs change or the tools evolve.

Code quality is the largest benefit

All nine interviewees named improved code quality as the biggest benefit of IntelliJ IDEA. In the study, code quality covers code review, testing, remediation, debugging, and refactoring – all crucial areas of development supported by capabilities built on more than 20 years of IDE intelligence. At the composite organization, this work accounts for about 30% of developers’ time, and we expect that number will only continue to grow as agents take on more code generation. 

Forrester models a 15% reduction in PR cycle time in Year 1, 17.5% in Year 2, and 20% in Year 3, as developers make more use of automated inspections, real-time code analysis, integrated testing, and refactoring tools. This benefit has a risk-adjusted present value of $16.3 million, more than half of the study’s total.

Interviewees credited IntelliJ IDEA’s understanding of dependencies across large, complex codebases for catching problems before they reach production. The Director of Software Engineering at a telecommunications company said their error rate “was also around 10% less when using IntelliJ IDEA, even before AI came.”

Forrester also notes that code review becomes even more important as teams adopt AI-assisted development, since AI-generated code has to be validated against the same quality standards.

Productivity gains that continue to grow

Forrester found that IntelliJ IDEA improves developer productivity by up to 20%, defining productivity as faster pull request throughput and team-level efficiency gains, combined with less friction from consolidating tools and switching context. IntelliJ IDEA makes code creation 20% more efficient by years 2 and 3, saving the business $5.7 million. Interviewees also said the IDE’s understanding of large codebases means developers avoid having to write additional code that other tools would require. One telecom engineering director said developers can now finish refactoring work in five hours instead of eight. Many of the features that make coding easier and more productive for developers writing code can also help developers using agents.

Onboarding is faster as well. With consistent environments and shared configurations, new developers become productive one week sooner, and remote development helps developers moving to a new project save 16 hours each. 

Forrester also links the productivity gains to higher developer satisfaction, which cuts turnover. This benefit, combined with faster onboarding, adds $8.2 million of value to the composite organization. 

An open approach to AI

Every interviewee highlighted IntelliJ IDEA’s open approach to AI as a key benefit. Developers can use JetBrains AI tools and Junie alongside third-party models and agents directly inside the IDE, so teams can evaluate new tools as they appear or as models change and choose different ones for different tasks. In a market where models update constantly, this flexibility is critical to ensure developers can access the best tool for the job at any given moment. 

Interviewees at organizations with high AI adoption reported large increases in output, with one CTO measuring a 10% to 40% boost in pull requests per developer per week. However, one head of engineering noted that while code creation with AI is much faster, review, debugging, and standardization are much slower, so the total time from presubmit to production is about the same. Forrester notes that because IntelliJ IDEA understands how code changes affect the rest of a project, it may help reduce the risks associated with AI-generated code, and embedded features could help alleviate those bottlenecks.

Where we’re going next

This study was commissioned by JetBrains and delivered by Forrester Consulting. Results are based on a composite organization built from interviews with nine IntelliJ IDEA customers.