Geertjan Wielenga has stated that the NetBeans Platform has an edge over Eclipse RCP, because NetBeans uses the Swing UI toolkit, whereas Eclipses uses their own Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT.)

“Isn't it weird that you consider it acceptable to run on your own proprietary UI toolkit?” he writes.

He calls for Eclipse to provide tools for creating applications on top of the NetBeans Platform, primarily so that legacy applications in Swing could be ported to an RCP.