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REALbasic has gone through three versions. Many of the rough edges have been smoothed. There is a large, established, user community in place.

One of REALbasic’s greatest strengths is database-oriented application development. The professional edition has a built-in database engine, and also connects to a wide variety of third-party databases.

REALbasic offers simple creation of applications that run on the Mac OS and Windows.

REALbasic targets utility and general application development with an array of interface controls, and the ability to create royalty-free standalone applications.

REALbasic offers off-screen compositing of graphics, and a sprite engine; both useful for game development.

REALbasic’s object-oriented style of development, strict scope, and strict variable typing will be familiar to those already comfortable with those methods.

REALbasic's code editor window offers history buttons for quickly navigating to recently-edited routines, and a pop-up menu of all objects and routines for quick access.

REALbasic offers several enticing features for expatriate Visual Basic developers: its language is similar to Visual Basic, and it imports Visual Basic forms and modules.

As a Macintosh-only application, REALbasic takes better advantage of the Macintosh environment, and offers greater integration with Macintosh-specific features. For example, the application build dialog is AppleScriptable. Full drag and drop is supported. Balloon help is supported without add-ons.

REALbasic builds for Mac OS X. (Not all features work yet, though, as OS X is currently a fast-moving target.)

REALbasic creates single-file applications, simplifying deployment — a strength it shares with Revolution. This gives both REALbasic and Revolution a strong advantage over many other HLD tools.

REAL Software’s aggressive practice of releasing new betas almost weekly means that developers have an excellent understanding of what features are in development and how far along they are.