BBEdit vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
BBEdit
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
BBEdit is a text editor from Bare Bones software headquartered in Massachusetts.N/A
Visual Studio
Score 8.7 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
BBEditMicrosoft Visual Studio
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BBEditVisual Studio
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
BBEditMicrosoft Visual Studio
Considered Both Products
BBEdit
Chose BBEdit
As a pure software IDE, BBEdit is showing its age. It's got things like syntax highlighting, source control support, and integration with command-line compilers… but popular features like automated refactoring and debugger integration have left it behind. On the other hand, …
Visual Studio

No answer on this topic

Best Alternatives
BBEditMicrosoft Visual Studio
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Score 9.3 out of 10
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Score 9.2 out of 10
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Score 9.4 out of 10
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Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
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Score 9.4 out of 10
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User Ratings
BBEditMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
9.5
(7 ratings)
9.0
(105 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
9.7
(7 ratings)
8.8
(15 ratings)
User Testimonials
BBEditMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
Bare Bones Software
I'm primarily a graphic designer who does occasional web development. For me, BBEdit works very well. I use it both for developer projects (editing code, editing system files) and for general text processing (cleaning up, formatting, or extracting text). I like that it offers real-time previews of edits to web project files. It comes with some nice editor themes and supports adding more or customizing them. I expect that for some coders, it will be inadequate. It is not an IDE. On the other end of the spectrum, someone who expects an experience more like Microsoft Word will be very disappointed; or if they wanted something more along the lines of Windows Notepad, they may find it to be overkill. It is an ASCII text editor with many advanced commands and tools built-in.
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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.
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Pros
Bare Bones Software
  • BBEdit remembers what I had open, so I never have to worry about losing work when I accidentally close the software. It will hold onto information almost indefinitely, so that the next time I open a program, I can access the information that I may have forgotten to save. Thankfully, its save function is also very simple to use, so I recommend still saving your work as needed.
  • Scripts are the most important aspect of BBEdit for the company I work for. Being able to import scripts and create new ones all in the same location are great.
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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.
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Cons
Bare Bones Software
  • The cost of this product has just become too much for the functionality that most people need. You can find free or $10 tools that do what most people need to do.
  • The BBEdit program has lots of functionality, but could it be too much? Are there too many options?
  • It seems that there are too many upgrades.
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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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Bare Bones Software
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.
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Usability
Bare Bones Software
No answers on this topic
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.
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Support Rating
Bare Bones Software
I've been using BBEdit — no joke — for nearly three decades now. Believe it or not, I'm still getting "upgrade pricing" 13 versions later. Bare Bones' support has always been stellar, and pricing continues to be affordable compared to similar tools.
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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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In-Person Training
Bare Bones Software
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.
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Online Training
Bare Bones Software
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Bare Bones Software
BBEdit wins over TextEdit every time. They are as different as chalk and cheese. I am so glad we moved to BBEdit.
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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
Bare Bones Software
  • It saves me time, not only with web projects, but even with design, when I want to strip out formatting in text, I bring it in to BBEdit to clean it up.
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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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ScreenShots