I get this question a lot: What is the difference between JBoss Developer Studio and JBoss Tools.

You basically get the same set of features and plug-ins (JSF, RichFaces, Seam, Visual page editor, Hibernate, jBPM and more) in JBoss Tools as in JBDS, however, JBDS adds the following:

• An installer
• Eclipse and Web Tools preconfigured
• JBoss EAP with JBoss AS and Seam preconfigured
• 3rd party plugins bundled and configured
• Access to RHEL and Red Hat Network
• Access to the JBoss/Red Hat supported software

This was adopted from Max Anderson’s blog.