Embedded Toolchain selection criteria's

For selecting proper toolchain for your embedded project following are the questions that you should ask to yourself:

1. Do you prefer a commercial quality product that gets the job done, or is it more important with a free or low-cost solution that may or may not work as intended?
2. What is the cost of project failure or delay? Does senior management accept that commercial risk, in return for a few dollars saved on tool purchase?
3. Are powerful tool capabilities or short learning curve and ease of use of primary interest?
4. Do you want to conform to the new open industry standards, such as the ECLIPSE IDE and the GNU gcc/gdb compiler and debugger toolchain, or rely on proprietary products with a vendor lock-in?
5. Do you want to work in an open and thriving tools eco system (the ECLIPSE IDE with its vast Eclipse plug-in eco system comes to mind here), or is extensibility and flexibility less of an issue?
6. Do you want a tool that only fits the needs right now, or do you want to future proof yourself with a tool that you can grow with as your needs increase over time?
7. Do you just need a basic edit/compile/debug IDE, or are you looking for a more complete embedded development platform, with features for software quality (such as MISRA-C coding standards checking, code complexity analysis), team collaboration (version control system and bug database GUI integration), advanced debugging (hard fault crash analysis, event/data/instruction tracing, dual-core debugging, RTOS aware debugging) and so on?
8. Do you need technical support and perhaps also training options, providing a safety net in case you run into problems?
9. Do you need deep integration with STM32 technologies, like STM32CubeMx and ST-LINK?

While selecting Toolchain following features should looked for in feature list:

• Event- and data tracing
• System profiling
• Instruction trace: record your program's execution, instruction-by-instruction
• RTOS-aware debugging
• Hard fault crash analysis

Following are some interesting links that I came across

http://blog.atollic.com/what-is-the-best-ide-tool-for-professional-stm32-development