GitHub Copilot vs. Microsoft Visual Studio Code vs. Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
GitHub Copilot
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
GitHub Copilot is presented as an AI pair programmer, that plugs into the user's editor. It then turns natural language prompts into code, offers multi-line function suggestions, speeds up test generation, filters out common vulnerable coding patterns, and blocks suggestions matching public code.
$10
per month
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft offers Visual Studio Code, an open source text editor that supports code editing, debugging, IntelliSense syntax highlighting, and other features.
$0
Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Redgate's SQL Toolbelt Essentials includes industry-standard tools for SQL Server development & deployment, enabling users to include SQL Server databases in agile processes and enabilng developers to embed robust and scalable development practices.
$1,209
per year per user (1-4 users)
Pricing
GitHub CopilotMicrosoft Visual Studio CodeRedgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
Editions & Modules
CoPilot for Individuals
$10
per month
CoPilot for Business
$19
per month per user
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GitHub CopilotMicrosoft Visual Studio CodeRedgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
Free Trial
YesNoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GitHub CopilotMicrosoft Visual Studio CodeRedgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
Considered Multiple Products
GitHub Copilot
Chose GitHub Copilot
In terms of AI and developing tasks, GitHub Copilot is the only tool I have used so far. Copilot Work, Copilot Web, Copilot Teams, Copilot Excel, Copilot Word, Copilot Outlook, Copilot Power Point are other agents of Copilot that I use daily, but are all complementary of GitHub …
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
The other IDE that I use is Eclipse. Comparing both, Microsoft Visual Studio Code it clearly wins in resource consuming. I can have open many instances of Microsoft Visual Studio Code and the memory ram usage it doesn't go very high. Another point where I prefer Microsoft …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
The licensing of the IntelliJ IDEs is prohibitive, I cannot be sure that I can continue to leverage them as I move between clients.

Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code offers a better one-stop-shopping experience if you are multi-lingual. There are plugins for just about every language imaginable making it great if you want one experience in every language you write code in. You don't get that with WebStorm or even with the …
Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
Chose Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
We did not consider other products before choosing Redgate.
Chose Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
We haven't compared SQL Compare with other tools in a VERY long time because they are honestly THE BEST.
Best Alternatives
GitHub CopilotMicrosoft Visual Studio CodeRedgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

BBEdit
BBEdit
Score 10.0 out of 10
DBeaver
DBeaver
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies

No answers on this topic

Vim
Vim
Score 9.4 out of 10
DBeaver
DBeaver
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises

No answers on this topic

Vim
Vim
Score 9.4 out of 10
DBeaver
DBeaver
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GitHub CopilotMicrosoft Visual Studio CodeRedgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(8 ratings)
8.7
(91 ratings)
8.0
(14 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.4
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(7 ratings)
9.1
(8 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.7
(23 ratings)
8.6
(5 ratings)
User Testimonials
GitHub CopilotMicrosoft Visual Studio CodeRedgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
Likelihood to Recommend
GitHub
Copilit is fantastic at the following: 1. Solving simple, well-defined problems, such as implementing an algorithm, manipulating a data structure, or string manipulation and regex. 2. Implementing simple APIs that are mainly CRUD in nature, with moderate business logic inside them, which may involve some processing or passing the data through an algorithm. 3. Implementation of well-defined activities, such as implementing a connection to an Oracle DB using Hibernate or JDBC, or implementing boilerplate code for a backend service to listen to Kafka events. It is not that great when it comes to understanding and implementing code in a proprietary DSL. It struggles when implementing a major feature across a complex codebase. I believe developers should also adopt the trust-but-verify paradigm when expecting highly secure or regulated code from GitHub Copilot.
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Microsoft
As a general workhorse IDE, Microsoft Visual Studio Codee is unmatched. Building on the early success of applications such as Atom, it has long been the standard for electron based IDEs. It can be outshone using IDEs that are dedicated to particular platforms, such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code for .net and the Jetbrains IDEs for Java, Python and others. For remote collaborative development, something like Zed is ahead of VSCode live share, which can be quite flakey.
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Redgate
We use SQL Compare to troubleshoot performance problems quite a bit since our data model is more like a template and not everything is 100% in sync and customization occurs between different client databases. We continually get pulled into performance issues and the developers will say Client A is performing different than Client B, why? Using SQL Compare, we usually find that one client was tuned and had indexes altered or added that weren't deployed to all clients or other objects weren't deployed correctly during the release. On the other hand, since our data model practices allow client databases to drift I tried to create a new golden image by trying to compare multiple databases based on the same data model and found it to be a very difficult process to complete using SQL Compare. SQL Compare gave me too much information and doesn't allow enough filtering to eliminate a lot of the noise.
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Pros
GitHub
  • Make code development faster and quicker.
  • Helps write better code standards for projects.
  • Provide the latest functions from the technology.
  • Notifies about the deprecated functions.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • 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.
Read full review
Redgate
  • Simple and easy comparison of database schemas and data. Differences can be copied or synced from one database to another with a click of a button.
  • You can save "projects" so that you can easily rerun a previous comparison whenever you need to.
  • It has a very simple, easy to learn interface. I've never needed to read any documentation or watch any tutorials in order to figure out how to do something.
Read full review
Cons
GitHub
  • The only issue I faced is the context token size, it can be increase.
  • Sometime with agent mode it takes too much time, which can be reduced but I understand it also depends on the complexity of the given task.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • 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
Read full review
Redgate
  • Pricing.... I wish there was an inexpensive developer version I could buy for myself.
  • Portability.... I would like to use it from a flash drive so I can use it where ever I am asked to work.
  • Unbundled.... This may be available already but I dont' recall I can buy it cheaply as a stand-alone product. Its only part of the bundle - cost effectively.
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Likelihood to Renew
GitHub
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
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.
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Redgate
No answers on this topic
Usability
GitHub
I feel that GitHub Copilot's overall usability is good due to its tight integration with Visual Studio and the workspace. However, developers expect greater ease of use, as there is a learning curve to realize productivity gains with the tool fully. I think there is room for improvement in GitHub Copilot's UI integration within Visual Studio.
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Microsoft
Microsoft Visual Studio Code earns a 10 for its exceptional balance of power and simplicity. Its intuitive interface, robust extension ecosystem, and integrated terminal streamline development. With seamless Git integration and highly customizable settings, it adapts perfectly to any workflow, making complex coding tasks feel effortless for beginners and experts alike.
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Redgate
It's a good tool to have, but becomes expensive to buy a user license for each developer.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
GitHub
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
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.
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Redgate
No answers on this topic
Performance
GitHub
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
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).
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Redgate
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
GitHub
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
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.
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Redgate
They have a great community website where you can search for answers but are also very responsive when it comes to direct support.
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Alternatives Considered
GitHub
It is useful that copilot integrates so well with vscode, which is a very common IDE. I used Tabnine for a little while but it was not that intuitive, and did not seem as helpful as GitHub copilot was. I have enjoyed GitHub copilot a lot, especially the ease of hitting the tab key and seeing quick progress in my tasks.
Read full review
Microsoft
Visual Studio Code stacks up nicely against Visual Studio because of the price and because it can be installed without admin rights. We don't exclusively use Visual Studio Code, but rather use Visual Studio and Visual Studio code depending on the project and which version of source control the given project is wired up to.
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Redgate
I've used Visual Studio Database Projects for this type of work in the past with some success, but Redgate SQL Compare is faster, more transparent, and simply easier to use. Faster is self explanatory. More transparent, means that it's much easier to set up your desired options for schema change deployment scripts. Easier to use, It's really dead simple. Start a project, connect your source, connect destination, click compare.
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Scalability
GitHub
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
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.
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Redgate
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
GitHub
  • Our ROI of the purchase of Copilot was met in less than a day. The timesave cannot be overstated
  • Programmer boredom/dissatisfaction is down because of less repetetive crud work.
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Microsoft
  • Saves money by replacing suites of tools such as Visual Studio, IntelliJ, etc.
  • Speeds development time and developer environment setup time
  • Strengthens code quality with integrated autoformatting and linting
  • Strengths Git practices by keeping version control tightly connected with the code
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Redgate
  • Makes deployment fairly simple. Cutting our deployment time down.
  • With the SDK, we can customize our deployment process very quickly and easily.
  • History is not great, it does create scripts you can go back and see but it would be nice to have a quicker version view by object to save time.
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ScreenShots