AWS Cloud9 vs. Microsoft Visual Studio Code

AWS Cloud9 is great for product engineering and coding where you must take time to pair program and code in a specific isolated environment. It is entirely cloud based so there's no worry about saving and data consistency. It is all hosted on the Amazon Web Services cloud. It is less appropriate for more general workflows that don't require a specific cloud instance.

Incentivized

For low-end devices, it is a very good tool, but for devices that have decent RAM and decent CPU, I would recommend Android Studio for Android dev as it has more features, and for others, I will recommend agile IDEs like Cursor and Anti-Gravity, as they offer higher limits on AI models, and autocomplete is unlimited as well.

Incentivized

• Great, fast interface - There is a large list of shortcuts that make development on this IDE an experience that can sometimes even compare to something native.
• Integrated debugging/troubleshooting - AWS Cloud9 has integrated debugging tools that are quite well-designed.
• Lambda integrations - Cloud9 allows you to instantly run and maintain Lambda functions. It's probably the best IDE for developing on AWS Lambda.

Incentivized

• Integrate with the git repository very well.
• Integrated copilot chat is very helpful to write code snippets and helps beginners to start with coding and development.
• Great library of available extensions is one of the best features in Microsoft Visual Studio Code.
• Dedicated Testing option to configure pytest and others are quite handy to use.

Incentivized

• According to the project that is being executed it can become slow.
• It does not have the basic text manipulators.
• Shared terminals sometimes take a while to display.

Incentivized

• The customization of key combinations should be more accessible and easier to change
• The auxiliary panels could be minimized or as floating tabs which are displayed when you click on them
• A monitoring panel of resources used by Microsoft Visual Studio Code or plugins and extensions would help a lot to be able to detect any malfunction of these

Incentivized

Solid tool that provides everything you need to develop most types of applications. The only reason not a 10 is that if you are doing large distributed teams on Enterprise level, Professional does provide more tools to support that and would be worth the cost.

Incentivized

I rate AWS Cloud9 a 7/10 for usability. It is seamless browser access and pre-configured terminal simplify setup for cloud-native tasks. However, the lack of offline capabilities and its legacy status compared to tools like CodeCatalyst hinder the experience. It remains functional, yet feels increasingly dated in early 2026

Incentivized

I rate Microsoft Visual Studio Code 9 out of 10 because it is best editor tool for development work. It has clean and simple interface. We can easily access the file navigation, search, git integration and extensions. It support multiple languages. overall it is very user friendly and works well for both new and experienced developers.

Incentivized

Overall, Microsoft Visual Studio Code is pretty reliable. Every so often, though, the app will experience an unexplained crash. Since it is a stand-alone app, connectivity or service issues don't occur in my experience. Restarting the app seems to always get around the problem, but I do make sure to save and backup current work.

Incentivized

Microsoft Visual Studio Code is pretty snappy in performance terms. It launches quickly, and tasks are performed quickly. I don't have a lot of integrations other than CoPilot, but I suspect that if the integration partner is provisioned appropriately that any performance impact would be pretty minimal. It doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles (unless you start adding plugins left and right).

Incentivized

Customer support is managed by the Cloud support team. I won't be able to comment on details, but it's fast.

Active development means filing a bug on the GitHub repo typically gets you a response within 4 days. There are plugins for almost everything you need, whether it be linting, Vim emulation, even language servers (which I use to code in Scala). There is well-maintained official documentation. The only thing missing is forums. The closest thing is GitHub issues, which typically has the answers but is hard to sift through -- there are currently 78k issues.

Incentivized

S3 is a great service for storing unstructured data. It is cheap and us an user we don't have to care about scaling. Amazon S3 is a managed service. We use it for avery simple projects in our organization.

Incentivized

The licensing of the IntelliJ IDEs is prohibitive, I cannot be sure that I can continue to leverage them as I move between clients.

Zed while interesting doesn't have the market or mindshare to be a daily driver working as part of a team. I wouldn't be able to benefit from many of the day to day automations and findings that the team invents during the course of delivery.

Incentivized

It is easily deployed with our Jamf Pro instance. There is actually very little setup involved in getting the app deployed, and it is fairly well self-contained and does not deploy a large amount of associated files. However, it is not particularly conducive to large project, multi-developer/department projects that involve some form of central integration.

Incentivized

• This software has been really useful for our company since thanks to the fact that you can work together with other colleagues in the same code, it is much easier to advance in the development of projects and thus be able to make your delivery in a much shorter time.
• Because it provides all the necessary tools to develop projects, there is a great saving of time and costs.
• It is easy to use so any user can use it and this makes it possible to streamline each project much faster and more if you do not necessarily have to be in the company to advance in them, and this is thanks to the fact that it can be used from anywhere with internet access.

• It's one more development environment to learn - Negative
• It facilitates using Windows programmer resources on macOS projects - Positive
• It is fairly quick to learn, less time spent in training and skill development - Positive
• Integration with Copilot promotes "vibe coding" - Both Positive and Negative

Incentivized