blog.jetbrains.com

Sunsetting Writerside IDE

In October 2023, we launched the Early Access Program for Writerside – a tool for authoring, testing, and publishing documentation. Built on the IntelliJ Platform, Writerside was available in two versions: a standalone tool and a plugin for JetBrains IDEs. Our goal was to serve two key audiences – developers who document their work and […]

Mar 11, 2025 - 15:31

In October 2023, we launched the Early Access Program for Writerside – a tool for authoring, testing, and publishing documentation. Built on the IntelliJ Platform, Writerside was available in two versions: a standalone tool and a plugin for JetBrains IDEs. Our goal was to serve two key audiences – developers who document their work and professional technical writers.

Since then, we’ve published 14 EAP releases, run tests and surveys, and continuously analyzed your feedback and usage statistics. Unfortunately, the results did not align with our expectations.

Despite strong adoption among developers and some technical writers, it became apparent that the overall market size was not large enough to sustain Writerside as a standalone product.

For these reasons, we have made the difficult decision to sunset Writerside.

Writerside plugin support remains

You can use the Writerside IDE until March 20, 2025. After that date, your license will expire. However, the plugin will remain available for free on JetBrains Marketplace, and you can continue using it with your JetBrains IDE.

If you currently use the standalone version, you can start using the Writerside plugin with your JetBrains IDE, regardless of whether you have a commercial or non-commercial IDE license.

If you don’t currently use a JetBrains IDE, you can download IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition to continue using Writerside for free.

While we do not plan any major changes to the functionality, we plan to continue providing support, updates, and bug fixes for the foreseeable future, as the Writerside plugin is used internally by JetBrains technical writers.