[yrio]

The plugins for alternative languages (PHP, Python) are available only for IntelliJ Ultimate / paid. It's not available in free / open source IntelliJ

So either [1] you buy IntelliJ Ultimate & get Java + other languages (PHP, Python, Ruby, etc except .NET and C++)

or [2] you buy the language specific IDE (cheaper) like PhpStorm, PyCharm, etc

[CraigJPerry]

That didn’t used to be the case. You used to be able to add the Python plugin to the free IDEA ide and that would give you java + pycharm - but only the free tier features of pycharm.

However, if you used the paid IDEA, adding the Python plugin gave you full PyCharm capabilities EXCEPT that IDEA was always based on version N of the core IDE platform where PyCharm was based on N+1 version, i.e. the smaller pycharm IDE sometimes had some newer platform features than the IDEA ide which led to occasional differences between IDEA + Python plugin vs PyCharm.

I switched to VSCode last year and let my licence lapse for Intellij so things may have changed.

What i will say, despite having moved to VSCode and being entirely happy - Intellij is the better platform. It’s the difference between 80% and 99% though, and the VSCode 80% is good enough. If i went back to full time dev, i would buy another jetbrains licence.