Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Android Studio
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Android Studio is an official Android development integrated development environment (IDE) for mobile application development in the Android operating system developed by Google. Android Studio is based on Jetbrains'N/A
Visual Studio
Score 8.8 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
Xamarin
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
N/AN/A
Pricing
Android StudioMicrosoft Visual StudioXamarin
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Xamarin
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Android StudioVisual StudioXamarin
Free Trial
NoNoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Android StudioMicrosoft Visual StudioXamarin
Considered Multiple Products
Android Studio
Chose Android Studio
Visual Studio supports androud development through DOT NET only. Eclipse is very slow in case of large project, and also lack in supprots. IntelliJ IDEA supports Android development with JAVA as well as Kotlin, but it also supports the development of other languages, so it's …
Chose Android Studio
Microsoft VSC is a great product that can be adapted for Android development, but it requires significantly more effort than using Android Studio.
Chose Android Studio
Android Studio is as good for Android development, as Visual Studio has been for Windows development. It is my first choice for Android development because it includes an excellent suite of tools and support for Android. Its built in refactoring and code fixes are much more …
Chose Android Studio
  • Debugging and testing are easy in Android Studio.
  • The errors of the codes can be found easily in Android Studio.
  • It has superior community support.
Visual Studio
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
VS is more resource hungry than it's lighter-weight counterparts, but makes up for it in a much more robust feature set. VS Code and Xamarin both have very limited interactivity ("Go to declaration/implementation," e.g.), and no built-in build or debug features. For C#, …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Xamarin was a great tool, however after it merged with Visual Studio, everything is finally in the same place. XCode is great for Swift/Objective C development, however that's not exactly cross compatible. Visual Studio has a lot of different environment targets and is …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Visual Studio can do what all of these alternatives can do and does them well. PowerApps is RAD and you just can't tweak apps like you can in Visual Studio. Xamarin is now supported in Visual Studio and IntelliJ is javascript which you can create inside of Visual Studio. Would …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Eclipse is primarily used for Java development, and Android Studio is used for Android app development. Since our work is mainly focused on .NET applications, we use Microsoft Visual Studio to develop our software solutions. Microsoft Visual Studio IDE is way above the rest of …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Visual Studio is better than NetBeans or Eclipse when writing software that will only run on a Windows OS. I would not recommend Visual Studio for writing software running on other OSs.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
For .NET development, there are few alternatives. And now that you can develop with Visual Studio for mac and mobile, I don't see any reason to use another IDE.
Xamarin
Chose Xamarin
Xamarin allows us to natively code against IOS and Android as opposed to just putting a Skin over it. Because of this native code stack the performance on Xamarin is off the charts better. You can really see the performance when you are using native phone features like GPS, …
Chose Xamarin
Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software …
Chose Xamarin
Apache Cordova is nothing more than a HTML Web VIew App. I've built an app using Cordova and it was a mess. With Xamarin, you get the platform level capabilities, which make the performance, in theory, no different than real native development. Cordova is not suitable for any …
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Android StudioMicrosoft Visual StudioXamarin
Small Businesses
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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Score 9.2 out of 10
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Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Swiftify
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Score 9.0 out of 10
PyCharm
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Score 9.2 out of 10
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Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
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User Ratings
Android StudioMicrosoft Visual StudioXamarin
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(15 ratings)
9.0
(105 ratings)
7.0
(12 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
9.8
(6 ratings)
8.8
(15 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Android StudioMicrosoft Visual StudioXamarin
Likelihood to Recommend
Google
Android Studio is a great mobile development IDE. I have found it is the best for both Android and Flutter development. It is created by JetBrains, so any developer used to their products, such as IntelliJ IDEA, will find themselves right at home with this IDE. It is very intuitive so it is a good choice for people needing to learn an IDE quickly.
Read full review
Microsoft
When working with base C# code for desktop and web projects, then Microsoft Visual Studio is ideal as it provides the libraries and interfaces needed to quickly create, test and deploy solutions. It is when slightly more complex scenarios are required that issues can arise. The built-in integration for things like PowerBI Paginated Reports and dashboards is far from ideal.
Read full review
Microsoft
If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and effort from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, Windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done.
Read full review
Pros
Google
  • Support for developing in either the emulator or a device means I can quickly diagnose platform specific issues
  • The support for Kotlin and Java is stellar, with projects easily containing both types of code with ease
  • Hot reload support means that I can quickly test changes without waiting for a length build and optimization process
  • Excellent cross platform support means I can develop on macOS, Windows, or Linux without losing functionality between platforms
Read full review
Microsoft
  • I like how the tabs and panels are organized; everything is gathered together so you can find what you're looking for quickly.
  • If you can't find something, there's a thorough search engine that searches all of Visual Studio's features.
  • The Team Foundation Server feature is fantastic since it allows us to easily deploy and roll back changes on the server.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Xamarin allows you to write cross platform code. This allows companies to build apps more quickly by writing less code. Having code abstracted and reused across multiple platforms allows for more testing and less issues overall.
  • The ability to use Visual Studio is a huge plus. Visual Studio is one of the best IDE's available and being able to write cross platforms apps while in a great IDE makes everything less painful.
  • Xamarin is now free with a large company backing. This means that bugs on the platform get fixed more quickly and there is a large community of developers.
Read full review
Cons
Google
  • Android Studio needs a very high amount of RAM and a high-end processor to run smoothly, which can't be affordable for everyone.
  • Updates in Gradle files can sometimes come up with a hectic improvement in whole code, which can lead us to improve some code and consume precious time.
  • Multitasking is very difficult in Android Studio due to its heavy consumption of resources.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Would be great if there was a better way to save and restore open tabs.
  • The built-in test runner can be improved, for example, by adding the ability to save a set of commonly run tests, etc.
  • Better integration for Microsoft SQL server would be great.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Forms - not 100% there. Still needs work but is production ready.
  • iOS - sometimes errors can be hard to understand, if they even show up.
  • Insights - Xamarin offers their own crash analytics software. However, it's not perfect and sometimes doesn't pick up crashes.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Google
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Microsoft
Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.
Read full review
Usability
Google
Android Studio is very useful for developers to write the code of Android apps. It provides auto implementation, suggestions, and removes boilerplate codes, which helps developers write clear and optimized code. Number of third party and Jetbrains plugins available to improve the speed of development and help the developer.
Read full review
Microsoft
I love the overall usability of Microsoft Visual Studio. I’ve been using this IDE for more than 20 years, and I’ve seen it evolve by leaps and bounds. Today, with AI and code-suggestion/completion features, developers no longer need to remember countless libraries, methods, or language syntax, or invest a huge amount of programming effort to complete a project. It truly offers everything a developer needs to program, debug, test, and deploy in a single IDE.
Read full review
Microsoft
If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done
Read full review
Support Rating
Google
Overall support for Android Studio is quite good. As the project is maintained by Google itself, frequent updates are usually made to Android Studio to keep the IDE update and bug-free. Many community forums are also available to help developers across the world if they face any issue.
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Microsoft
There are many resources available supporting Visual Studio IDE. Microsoft whitepapers, forum posts, and online Visual Studio documentation. There are countless demonstration videos available, as well. If users are having issues, they can call Microsoft Support, but depending on the company's agreement with Microsoft, the number of included support calls will vary from organization to organization. I've found that Microsoft support calls can be hit or miss depending on who you get, but they can usually get you with the right support person for your issue.
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Microsoft
I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow
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In-Person Training
Google
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
IT is very complicated to understand all the functions that the environment has if you are not familiar with this type of development environments. It is important to select a good in-person training to achieve to understand all the possibilities and the capacity of the application. In this case, you will be able to develop a lot type of different applications.
Read full review
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Google
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
If you are not accustomed to develop in this type of development environments it would be complicated to follow all the parts of the course because if the course does not include a great tour with all the concepts to develop you will not have the option to understand all the functions.
Read full review
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Google
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.
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Alternatives Considered
Google
Android Studio is the best possible offering to make android based apps. It's a product by Google and the official integrated development environment for android app development. That's why it is able to offer the easiest to learn and simplest coding environment to developers. But it needs higher performance and is at times slower as compared to Flutter, etc. So that's the only drawback, but overall it's better than most tools for app development.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Microsoft
Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Google
  • Positive Impact: No license fee, saves a lot of money upfront.
  • Positive Impact: Faster project delivery, because errors are cached quickly while typing code allowing to fix the code at the same time, and this eliminates the need of fixing bugs which saves time. Saves 20% of my time.
  • Negative Impact: Not works well on low end laptops with RAM less than 16GB.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Using the integration between Visual Studio and our source control service, the cost of re-work and losing code is drastically reduced.
  • Paid versions of Visual Studio enable developers to be so much more productive than hacked-together open source solutions that it's hard to imagine developing in Windows without it.
  • When combined with support subscriptions and the vast array of free online help options available, Visual Studio saves our developers time by keeping them coding and testing, not wasting their time trying to guess their way out of problems or spend endless hours online hoping to find answers.
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Microsoft
  • Saves development time and deliver fast.
  • Allows inhouse developers build both Android and iOS application without switching languages.
  • Allows use coding in C# in Visual studio IDE from which we can code in different languages. We don't need multiple IDEs installed
Read full review
ScreenShots