Azure DevOps Server vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure DevOps Server
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Azure DevOps Server (formerly Team Foundation Server, or TFS) is the on-premise version of Azure DevOps. To license Azure DevOps Server an Azure DevOps license and a Windows operating system license (e.g. Windows Server) for each machine running Azure DevOps Server.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
Pricing
Azure DevOps ServerMicrosoft Visual Studio
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure DevOps ServerVisual Studio
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure DevOps ServerMicrosoft Visual Studio
Considered Both Products
Azure DevOps Server
Chose Azure DevOps Server
Azure DevOps is a fully integrated solution that solves all of the problems that our separate tools did in a much easier-to-use way. Before we implemented DevOps we had three different solutions that we had to integrate with each other and required a lot of manual intervention …
Chose Azure DevOps Server
Overall Atlassian products seem to be less stable. Azure DevOps [Server (formerly Team Foundation Server)] also has Test Center and Build functionality built in. This prevents needing a handful of separate products loosely coupled together to get a comprehensive solution to …
Chose Azure DevOps Server
Git and GitHub are very popular right now and they are OK. But they do not integrate automated Testing and Building... The Work Item Management of Jira is about as complicated as the one of TFS so we use Trello. The other Source Control Systems are more complex to use because …
Chose Azure DevOps Server
I have only previously used Visual Source Safe, back in the early noughties within a very small development team, TFS is the natural evolution from Visual Source Safe which primarily was just a repository for source code. You can't really compare the two and MS released TFS as …
Chose Azure DevOps Server
While TeamForge was a very competent product, we found (back end) administration of it was not for the feint of heart and it was a seperate entity to our test system. Team Foundation Server is more in line with our administration skill set and has brought testing under the …
Chose Azure DevOps Server
Based on the fact we are Microsoft shop, it makes sense and it has an great integration to RM for code release. At the time it was the best decision for what we needed as a team. If it were up to me, moving to Git would be the right direction. It is less costly and it is …
Chose Azure DevOps Server
Project & Work Item tracking with users through ADFS.
Visual Studio
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
With Visual Studio I just code on the front-end and click the VCR-like play icon in the toolbar to launch the code in a browser. WebStorm doesn't give me any such convenience. With WebStorm I have to launch my code in IIS and use WebStorm to simply edit the files. I also have …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
PyCharm is a one programming language tool. If you program in multiple languages Visual Studio if much better. Until a few weeks ago, if you were developing in Java, Eclipse was the IDE to use, but now that Visual Studio supports Java, I would look to see if Visual Studio might …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
It provides many inbuilt GUI feature that is used to create window applications easily. This tool provides more simplicity and flexibility to build applications as compared to other IDE tools.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
I have rather limited experience with Eclipse and and VS Code. I would choose Visual Studio any day over Eclipse as Visual Studio is comparably more straight-forward and easier to use. Visual Studio is not straight-forward or easy to use by any measure, but it is easier than Ecl…
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
For .Net development on the Windows platform, there really is not a better alternative.
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.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Eclipse: I did not have a good experience with Eclipse when I started to code in Python. I chose Eclipse because that's what the person doing my Python training was using and I used it to follow along better. I found it difficult to figure out how to get my environment setup …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Visual Studio Code is another great IDE which can be use to develop client side app fast. It does have lot of plugins support too but is no way comparable to Visual Studio IDE. Visual Studio IDE gives us immense options to compile and test our code even during runtime. We can …
Best Alternatives
Azure DevOps ServerMicrosoft Visual Studio
Small Businesses
GitHub
GitHub
Score 9.1 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
GitHub
GitHub
Score 9.1 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Perforce P4
Perforce P4
Score 7.2 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure DevOps ServerMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(48 ratings)
9.0
(105 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
6.0
(4 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(10 ratings)
8.8
(15 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure DevOps ServerMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
Azure DevOps is good to use if you are all-in on the Microsoft Azure stack. It's fully integrated across Azure so it is a point-and-click for most of what you will need to achieve. If you are new to Azure make sure you get some outside experience to help you otherwise it is very easy to overcomplicate things and go down the wrong track, or for you to manually create things that come out of the box.
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
Pros
Microsoft
  • Reporting Integration- Azure boards provides Kanban and other dashboard, their templates for easy management of project.
  • Project Pipeline- easy integration and development of CI/CD pipelines, helped in testing, releasing project artifacts.
  • Version Control- Integration with Git and code IDE made it easy to share, review our code, fix bugs and do testing.
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
Cons
Microsoft
  • Can add more build templates for specific technology requirements
  • Can have more features in dashboards which can help dev teams stream line their tasks and priorities
  • Can have raise alarm feature in case of any sort of failure in devops pipeline execution
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
Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
Because we are a Microsoft Gold Partner we utilize most of their software and we have so much invested in Team Foundation Server now it would take a catastrophic amount of time and resources to switch to a different product.
Read full review
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
Usability
Microsoft
For standard users the interface is friendly. but if you are a manager some tools are a little confusing to use, like the query system that you always need to create from scratch. Templates should be more helpful for queries and for standard procedures that you need to duplicate PBIs over time. The search history of Work Items is a little painful to use.
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
Support Rating
Microsoft
I have not had to use the support for Azure DevOps Server. There have never been any issues where I was not able to figure it out or quickly resolve. Our Scrum Master has used support before though, and the service has always been prompt and clear with a customer-focus
Read full review
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.
Read full review
In-Person Training
Microsoft
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
Online Training
Microsoft
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
Implementation Rating
Microsoft
Do research beforehand and, if possible, do a trial run before implementing into production environment.
Read full review
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
In my opinion, DevOps covers the development process end to end way better than Jira or GitHub. Both competitors are nice in their specific fields but DevOps provides a more comprehensive package in my opinion. It is still crazy to see that the whole suite can be used for free. The productivity increase we realized with DevOps is worth real money!
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
Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • It has streamlined the pipeline and project management for our agile effort.
  • It has helped our agile team get organized since that is a new methodology being leveraged within the Enterprise.
  • The calendar has improved visibility into different OOOs across the project team since we all come from different departments across the larger organization.
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.
Read full review
ScreenShots