Visual Studiovs
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code: Code editing. Redefined
Visual Studio
IDE for .NET and C++ development on Windows
As of 29 August 2026, Visual Studio is free to use. Visual Studio is Microsoft's IDE for . Softwr lists it under Developer Tools.
Overview
What Visual Studio does
Visual Studio is Microsoft's IDE for .NET and C++ development on Windows, with the free Community edition and paid Professional and Enterprise subscriptions.
What people use it for
- Managing complex, large-scale projects across multiple platforms
- Commercial development in small businesses
- DevOps and automated deployment workflows
- Windows/SQL Server developer and tester roles
- Short-term or month-to-month IDE access needs
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Visual Studio.
- Community edition is free only for individual developers, classroom use, academic research and open-source contribution, not general commercial use
- Monthly subscriptions are $45 per user per month for Professional and $250 per user per month for Enterprise, and do not include perpetual use rights the way annual Standard subscriptions do
- A standalone perpetually licensed Visual Studio Professional 2022 costs $499 as a one-time purchase, separate from the subscription tiers
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Visual Studio
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- Visual StudiovsESLint
ESLint: Find and fix problems in JavaScript code
- Visual Studiovspnpm
pnpm: Fast, disk space efficient package manager
- Visual StudiovsTurborepo
Turborepo: High-performance build system for JavaScript and TypeScript monorepos
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
What are the pricing differences between subscription types?
Standard subscriptions include access to more benefits, such as Azure dev/test pricing, monthly Azure individual credit, software and download access, services, training, and support. Monthly subscriptions offer flexibility but fewer benefits.
SourceAre discounts available for startups?
There aren't any discounts available to start-ups, however an unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for specific scenarios like open source work.
SourceWho can use Visual Studio Community for free?
In non-enterprise organizations, up to five users can use it. Enterprise organizations (greater than 250 PCs or greater than $1M annual revenue) cannot use it beyond academic/open-source scenarios.
SourceWhat's the renewal pricing structure?
Enterprise standard renews at $214.09/month (after initial $499.92); Professional at $66.59/month (after $99.99).
SourceKeep looking
Where to go from Visual Studio
- Visual Studio alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Visual Studio pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Visual Studio badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Developer Tools softwareThe full category
- Best Developer Tools softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Developer Tools software for
Compare Visual Studio with
- ESLint
- pnpm
- Turborepo
- Keil MDK
- RAD Studio
- Bazel
- JetBrains Rider
- Atlantis
- Jitsu
- Notepad++
- Azure DevOps
- Bitbucket
- Vite
- Daytona
- Depot
- Earthly
- Keil MDK
- Bazel
Other Developer Tools software
High-performance build system for JavaScript and TypeScript monorepos
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Open source12 researched notesOpen source event pipeline that streams behavioural data to your own warehouse
Free, then $99/mo12 researched notesInfrastructure for spinning up secure, sub-second sandboxes to run AI-generated code
Free, then $0.0504/mo8 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Visual Studio, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Visual Studio
Visual Studio alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Visual Studio pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Visual Studio
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Visual Studio badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
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