I've been helping another team at work evaluate IDEs for C++ recently. The 3 they started looking at were Qt Creator, vscode and NetBeans (that's my influence, lots of Sun baggage). IMO they are all much of a muchness GUI wise, pretty similar in terms of features. I find NetBeans better for navigation, but Qt Creator better for searching code. At work we have a large code base (many millions of lines of code). How the IDE copes with that is, for me, the main issue.
- RAM. Particularly Java based IDEs can consume many 10s of Gbytes when loading a large project, which can make them very unwieldy.
- "Code Model" This is _the_ big thing, and the USP for this kind of environment. The code model is what will allow the IDE to do smart navigation - jumping between definition/declaration/uses, refactoring, opening headers etc etc. Sadly there is an infinite number of bad build systems. And the IDE needs to grok the build system in order to build an impeccable code model - it needs to know all of the include paths and compilation macros.
My advice is to try a few IDEs and see which one works best with your project(s).
If you ware working on an open source project then
JetBrains does offer licenses for CLion. The conditions seem fairly stringent.