Keil vs TrueSTUDIO IDE

[Bogdan Golab]

Posted on January 19, 2018 at 16:19

I have been using Keil IDE for years (as a hobbyist).

Maybe someone who knows both Keil & TrueStudio could share some details about pros & cons.

I know that the primary difference is lack of licensing limits in TS (Keil - 32kB for non F0/L0 MCUs). I have Segger programmer/debugger (read that some  features may need it on TrueStudio).

[CCard.1]

HI Guys, this might be a fairly old thread but just for anyone else who may still be interested in this. These are opinions on the two.

Pros of Keil

1. First off for me the most important thing is the debugger. I find the use of the debugger is invaluable. In this Keil wins hands down. Unfortunately my workplace is using Truestudio and a lot of the legacy projects are still in Truestudio. Debugging with the gdb debugger in Truestudio is an absolute nightmare to say the least. Sometimes it refuses to connect to the chip or it fails to write to the flash. Just to be sure I ran the debugger of each IDE with the same hardware setup on both platforms to see how the debuggers would perform and sure enough Keil was brilliant and gdb was very poor to say the least with connection dropping out and sometime refusing to connect.
2. The other thing found much more easier in Keil is setting up a new project with all the available Packs (so similar to the STMCubeMX packages e.g. CMSIS) and changing processor or upgrading projects was much less painful. Migrating projects or starting new projects in Truestudio is not so straight forward.
3. Compiling somtimes in Truestudio is really buggy. It fails to open files sometimes and on occasion will fail compilation and then if you just compile again with no changes it is successful.

Pros of Truestudio

1. The main issue and the main drawback I found with Keil is the development environment. It does seem to be little bit outdated compared to Truestudio. Little things like hoovering over a variables and seeing it's contents is not possible in Keil. I like to also have a dark theme with all my keywords coloured in certain colours and Truestudio is great for this and you can download predefined themes or create your own. The editor seems a lot more intuitive with a lot more features compared to Keil.
2. The new version STM32CubeIDE as someone already has mentioned is now free. So that is a big plus.

There are obviously a lot more differences between the two but I find that they are minor issues and probably don't need to be mentioned.