I find that the free tools put forth by Microchip are fine for everyday use. Don't call me an expert on it, but I think mikroelektronika costs too much for low level designs, ironically what its intended audience is. But again, don't quote me. The PICKit3 costs $45 last I checked. It may have recently gone down. Or up. I haven't checked recently.
The mikroe ide and compiler are totally free and can be used for any purpose. The limitation is the size of code. In practice almost every beginner will be inside that limit.
Download it and try it. Like I said -its free and streets ahead of microchips offerings. If you want the same facilities you have to pay a lot more from another third party vendor - microchip doesnt do that much in an integrated fashion. What they do is good quality (I'm not a microchip knocker) but its all very disjointed. They are trying to catch up
(I noticed just last year they seem to be waking up) but they are a long way away just yet.
If you are doing more than one project I'd suggest its microchip that gets very expensive in both time and money.
I have both the mikro programmer and a pickit 3 here.
The downside to mikroe is you will have to wait a few months if microchip release a new family with different programming requirements (not often but it has happened)
Also I had an issue with the pickits data plug working loose after a few uses. Just a dry joint but the design isnt brilliant.
The downside to microchip themselves is their poor level of support and activity for beginners and hobbyists. Their forum is rubbish.
Microchip (quite rightly) concentrates on professional designers and this shows in their low number of inexpensive add-ons dev boards and other tools
as well as their poor forum.
I use pics professionally but my daily use is mikroe. I use microchips services as second line support when anything weird happens.
Incidently if you go for a mikroe dev board (such as an easyPIC7) you dont need a seperate programmer - its built in.
You can still use microchip for data sheets app notes and their brilliant offline (or online) chip selector.
Actually if you compare the world of PIC chips to that of ARM's or other kit - we are very well served all round.