Anaconda vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Anaconda
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Anaconda provides access to the foundational open-source Python and R packages used in modern AI, data science, and machine learning. These enterprise-grade solutions enable corporate, research, and academic institutions around the world to harness open-source for competitive advantage and research. Anaconda also provides enterprise-grade security to open-source software through the Premium Repository.
$0
per month
Visual Studio
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Visual Studio (now in the 2022 edition) is a 64-bit IDE that makes it easier to work with bigger projects and complex workloads, boasting a fluid and responsive experience for users. The IDE features IntelliCode, its automatic code completion tools that understand code context and that can complete up to a whole line at once to drive accurate and confident coding.
$45
per month
Pricing
AnacondaMicrosoft Visual Studio
Editions & Modules
Free Tier
$0
per month
Starter Tier
$9
per month
Business Tier
$50
per month per user
Enterprise Tier
60.00+
per month per user
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AnacondaVisual Studio
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AnacondaMicrosoft Visual Studio
Considered Both Products
Anaconda
Chose Anaconda
It provides several IDEs like Spyder and Jupiter that would be enough for me to write my Python script. You can easily install it on a Windows or Linux computer and supports many libraries.
Visual Studio
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Some of the editors are suitable for a particular programming language . For example PyCharm is suited for Python .
Visual Studio has support for many languages and Visual Studio is comparatively light weight from most of the IDE . The ability to get extensions and use them is …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
I generally utilize Visual Studio because of the dynamic code environment, and the robust debugging tools. C#, C++, and ASP are good fits but Python sometimes is harder to get all the libraries loaded correctly and dynamic viewing during code development.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
AnacondaMicrosoft Visual Studio
Platform Connectivity
Comparison of Platform Connectivity features of Product A and Product B
Anaconda
9.3
25 Ratings
11% above category average
Microsoft Visual Studio
-
Ratings
Connect to Multiple Data Sources9.822 Ratings00 Ratings
Extend Existing Data Sources8.024 Ratings00 Ratings
Automatic Data Format Detection9.721 Ratings00 Ratings
MDM Integration9.614 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Exploration
Comparison of Data Exploration features of Product A and Product B
Anaconda
8.5
25 Ratings
2% above category average
Microsoft Visual Studio
-
Ratings
Visualization9.025 Ratings00 Ratings
Interactive Data Analysis8.024 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Preparation
Comparison of Data Preparation features of Product A and Product B
Anaconda
9.1
26 Ratings
11% above category average
Microsoft Visual Studio
-
Ratings
Interactive Data Cleaning and Enrichment8.823 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Transformations8.026 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Encryption9.719 Ratings00 Ratings
Built-in Processors9.620 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform Data Modeling
Comparison of Platform Data Modeling features of Product A and Product B
Anaconda
9.2
24 Ratings
9% above category average
Microsoft Visual Studio
-
Ratings
Multiple Model Development Languages and Tools9.023 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated Machine Learning8.921 Ratings00 Ratings
Single platform for multiple model development10.024 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-Service Model Delivery9.019 Ratings00 Ratings
Model Deployment
Comparison of Model Deployment features of Product A and Product B
Anaconda
9.5
21 Ratings
11% above category average
Microsoft Visual Studio
-
Ratings
Flexible Model Publishing Options10.021 Ratings00 Ratings
Security, Governance, and Cost Controls9.020 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AnacondaMicrosoft Visual Studio
Small Businesses
Jupyter Notebook
Jupyter Notebook
Score 9.1 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Posit
Posit
Score 9.7 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Posit
Posit
Score 9.7 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AnacondaMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(38 ratings)
9.0
(105 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(3 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
8.9
(9 ratings)
8.8
(15 ratings)
User Testimonials
AnacondaMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
Anaconda
I have asked all my juniors to work with Anaconda and Pycharm only, as this is the best combination for now. Coming to use cases: 1. When you have multiple applications using multiple Python variants, it is a really good tool instead of Venv (I never like it). 2. If you have to work on multiple tools and you are someone who needs to work on data analytics, development, and machine learning, this is good. 3. If you have to work with both R and Python, then also this is a good tool, and it provides support for both.
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Microsoft
It's useful for app development, debugging, and testing. I've been using it for two years and have seen it grow into a fantastic tool. All of the features, NuGet packages, and settings that enable different types of projects are fantastic. It also has a connection to Azure DevOps and Git. It's a fantastic product that's simple to use.
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Pros
Anaconda
  • Anaconda is a one-stop destination for important data science and programming tools such as Jupyter, Spider, R etc.
  • Anaconda command prompt gave flexibility to use and install multiple libraries in Python easily.
  • Jupyter Notebook, a famous Anaconda product is still one of the best and easy to use product for students like me out there who want to practice coding without spending too much money.
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Microsoft
  • Since Microsoft offers a free Community Edition of the IDE many of our new developers have used it at home or school and are very familiar with the user interface, requiring little training to move up to the paid, enterprise-friendly editions we use.
  • The online community support for Visual Studio is outstanding, as solid or better than any other commercial or open-source project software.
  • Microsoft continuously keeps the product up to date and has maintained a history of doing so. They use it internally for their own development so there is little chance it will ever fall out of favor and become unsupported.
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Cons
Anaconda
  • It can have a cloud interface to store the work.
  • Compatible for large size files.
  • I used R Studio for building Machine Learning models, Many times when I tried to run the entire code together the software would crash. It would lead to loss of data and changes I made.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Certain settings and features can sometimes be challenging to locate. The interface isn't always intuitive.
  • Sometimes there are too many ways to do the same thing. For example, users can quickly add a new workspace in Source Control Explorer when a local path shows as "Not Mapped," but it doesn't indicate that the user might want to check the dropdown list of workspaces. The shortcut of creating a new workspace by clicking on the "Not Mapped" link can lead to developers creating too many workspaces and causing workspace management to become unwieldy. If the shortcut link were removed, the user would be forced to use the Workspace dropdown. While it can add an extra step to the process, workspaces would be managed more easily, and this would enforce consistency. At the very least, there should be a high-level administrative setting to hide the shortcut link.
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Likelihood to Renew
Anaconda
It's really good at data processing, but needs to grow more in publishing in a way that a non-programmer can interact with. It also introduces confusion for programmers that are familiar with normal Python processes which are slightly different in Anaconda such as virtualenvs.
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Microsoft
VS is the best and is required for building Microsoft applications. The quality and usefulness of the product far out-weight the licensing costs associated with it.
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Usability
Anaconda
I am giving this rating because I have been using this tool since 2017, and I was in college at that time. Initially, I hesitated to use it as I was not very aware of the workings of Python and how difficult it is to manage its dependency from project to project. Anaconda really helped me with that. The first machine-learning model that I deployed on the Live server was with Anaconda only. It was so managed that I only installed libraries from the requirement.txt file, and it started working. There was no need to manually install cuda or tensor flow as it was a very difficult job at that time. Graphical data modeling also provides tools for it, and they can be easily saved to the system and used anywhere.
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Microsoft
The thing I like the most is Visual Studio doesn't suffer from Microsoft's over eager marketing department who feel they need to redesign the UI (think Office and windows) which forces users to loose large amounts of productivity having to learn software that they had previously known.
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Support Rating
Anaconda
Anaconda provides fast support, and a large number of users moderate its online community. This enables any questions you may have to be answered in a timely fashion, regardless of the topic. The fact that it is based in a Python environment only adds to the size of the online community.
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Microsoft
Between online forums like StackOverflow, online documentation, MSDN forums, and the customer support options, I find it very easy to get support for Visual Studio IDE when I need it. If desired, one can also download the MSDN documentation about the IDE and have it readily available for any support needs.
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Alternatives Considered
Anaconda
I have experience using RStudio oustide of Anaconda. RStudio can be installed via anaconda, but I like to use RStudio separate from Anaconda when I am worin in R. I tend to use Anaconda for python and RStudio for working in R. Although installing libraries and packages can sometimes be tricky with both RStudio and Anaconda, I like installing R packages via RStudio. However, for anything python-related, Anaconda is my go to!
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Microsoft
I personally feel Visual Studio IDE has [a] better interface and [is more] user friendly than other IDEs. It has better code maintainability and intellisense. Its inbuilt team foundation server help coders to check on their code then and go. Better nugget package management, quality testing and gives features to extract TRX file as result of testing which includes all the summary of each test case.
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Return on Investment
Anaconda
  • It has helped our organization to work collectively faster by using Anaconda's collaborative capabilities and adding other collaboration tools over.
  • By having an easy access and immediate use of libraries, developing times has decreased more than 20 %
  • There's an enormous data scientist shortage. Since Anaconda is very easy to use, we have to be able to convert several professionals into the data scientist. This is especially true for an economist, and this my case. I convert myself to Data Scientist thanks to my econometrics knowledge applied with Anaconda.
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Microsoft
  • We've had hundreds of hours saved by the rapid development that Visual Studio provides.
  • We've lost some time in the Xamarin updates. However, being cross platform, we ultimately saved tons of time not having to create separate apps for iOS and Android.
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ScreenShots