JetBrains Rider vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Rider
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
JetBrains supports .NET development with Rider, a .NET IDE based on the IntelliJ platform and ReSharper.
$14.90
per month per user
Visual Studio
Score 9.0 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
JetBrains RiderMicrosoft Visual Studio
Editions & Modules
For Individuals
$149
per year per user
dotUltimate for Individual
$169
per year per user
All Products Pack for Individuals
$289
per year per user
For Organizations
$419
per year per user
dotUltimate for Organizations
$469
per year per user
All Products Pack for Organizations
$779
per year per user
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
RiderVisual Studio
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsdotUltimate: All .NET tools, ReSharper C++ and JetBrains Rider, together in one pack—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
JetBrains RiderMicrosoft Visual Studio
Considered Both Products
Rider
Chose JetBrains Rider
Both are very similar in terms of functionalities provided, however Rider can be combined with IntellIJ adding a robust feature set.
Chose JetBrains Rider
It helps you develop and not have to think too much about some things because of the IntelliSense support for Unreal (that others don't have) and it has a quick search with multiple types as well. Visual code has an ok search, but no IntelliSense, Visual Studio has a slow …
Chose JetBrains Rider
JetBrains Rider provides better refactoring suggestions and support than Visual Studio, and uniquely, it provides specific recommendations for the Unity engine.
Chose JetBrains Rider
Rider (and the entire IntelliJ suite) has been my preferred IDE for years. Visual Studio is wonderful as well, but Rider just keeps ahead in the important features. More importantly, both IDEs provide healthy competition and I only see this getting better.

Compared to other …
Chose JetBrains Rider
Rider is hands down smoother and way less glitchy than Visual Studio Enterprise. There are way more refactoring capabilities and spell check so that your code is readable, maintainable, and easy to follow. Since Rider is cross-platform, our developers are no longer constrained …
Visual Studio
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Sublime Text and JetBrains Rider are both great tools, but neither one is developed enough to provide the environment we need right now for software development. Visual Studio IDE lets us debug, create and run unit tests, do performance tweaking and fine-tuning, and program for …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Visual Studio was my preferred IDE before Rider became mature enough to replace it. Rider's performance, source control tools, and built-in refactoring make VS limited to specific use cases where Rider doesn't support.

Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Visual Studio IDE is on par with Rider. There are some code insights and package management that Rider does better, but it's the debugger and profiling I find more powerful in Visual Studio IDE. I also consider the UI in Visual Studio IDE to be more appealing and intuitive to …
Top Pros
Top Cons
TrustRadius Insights
JetBrains RiderMicrosoft Visual Studio
Highlights

TrustRadius
Research Team Insight
Published

Rider and Visual Studio IDE are both tools used for .Net development.  Rider is a .Net Development service built specifically to enable developers to write programs on the .Net platform.  Visual Studio IDE is an integrated development environment originally built for development on Microsoft platforms, but now supports development for most popular languages.  Both development tools are popular with businesses of all sizes that work on the .Net platform.

Features

Rider and Visual Studio IDE both aid developers in creating .Net applications, but they also have some standout features that set them apart from each other. 

Rider provides a highly customizable user interface, including custom keybindings, collapsable windows, and color schemes.  In addition to essential version control features included in most IDE’s, Rider also includes stashing and patching features, making it easy to track multiple pending changes. For code refactoring, Rider also includes advanced features such as condition inversion and method extraction.  Rider is an ideal tool for businesses looking for a feature rich .Net development tool.

Visual Studio IDE was one of the first tools built for .net development, so it supports legacy .Net code and extensions.  Additionally, Visual Studio IDE has developed support for other coding languages such as Python.  Visual Studio IDE also offers a free to use option.  All in all, Visual Studio IDE is ideal for businesses working with legacy .Net code or who want an IDE that can work for several popular coding languages.

Limitations

Rider and Visual Studio IDE both provide support for developers, but they also have some limitations that are important to consider.

Rider provides many advanced tools to aid in development, but it lacks support for some legacy modules.  Businesses working with a lot of legacy code may consider a different development tool.  Additionally, Rider is built primarily with .Net in mind, so id isn’t ideal for businesses that want to use it to develop in other languages.  For individual users, there is also no free version of Rider.

Visual Studio provides support for legacy code, but it only provides basic versioning features.  Businesses that want to take advantage of features such as stashing should consider a different tool.  Similarly, Visual Studio IDE only provides basic tools for refactoring.  Visual Studio IDE is a poor choice for businesses that want to provide their developers with the most advanced .Net features available.

Pricing

Visual Studio’s basic subscription starts at $45.00 per month and includes essential development features.  Businesses looking for priority support or professional training can purchase the Professional subscription for $1,199.00 per year, with discounts for renewal.  A community version is available for individual users.

Rider is available as an annual or monthly subscription, starting as low as  $139.00 per year.  Rider is also included in larger Jetbrains packages that include other development tools. 

Best Alternatives
JetBrains RiderMicrosoft Visual Studio
Small Businesses
Visual Studio
Visual Studio
Score 9.0 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Visual Studio
Visual Studio
Score 9.0 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Visual Studio
Visual Studio
Score 9.0 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
JetBrains RiderMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
9.2
(6 ratings)
9.3
(104 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(1 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(1 ratings)
8.8
(15 ratings)
User Testimonials
JetBrains RiderMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
JetBrains
Initially you may think it’s not worth paying and that there are better free options, which is definitely a lie we once tried to live with. It has everything you may ever need in .NET world, code analysis and debugging works super well and all the SQL/noSQL related integrations are just next level compared to the competition. It’s worth every penny.
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Microsoft
It's useful for app development, debugging, and testing. I've been using it for two years and have seen it grow into a fantastic tool. All of the features, NuGet packages, and settings that enable different types of projects are fantastic. It also has a connection to Azure DevOps and Git. It's a fantastic product that's simple to use.
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Pros
JetBrains
  • Provides a smooth, efficient IDE for developing .NET applications. Performance has been much better than Visual Studio in my experience.
  • Integrated refactoring tools are really comprehensive and useful.
  • Integrates with other JetBrains products such as TeamCity, Upsource, dotTrace, etc.
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Microsoft
  • Since Microsoft offers a free Community Edition of the IDE many of our new developers have used it at home or school and are very familiar with the user interface, requiring little training to move up to the paid, enterprise-friendly editions we use.
  • The online community support for Visual Studio is outstanding, as solid or better than any other commercial or open-source project software.
  • Microsoft continuously keeps the product up to date and has maintained a history of doing so. They use it internally for their own development so there is little chance it will ever fall out of favor and become unsupported.
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Cons
JetBrains
  • Startup time. It takes a while to index big projects.
  • Rarely it loses the intellisense and the only way to get it back is by restarting.
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Microsoft
  • Certain settings and features can sometimes be challenging to locate. The interface isn't always intuitive.
  • Sometimes there are too many ways to do the same thing. For example, users can quickly add a new workspace in Source Control Explorer when a local path shows as "Not Mapped," but it doesn't indicate that the user might want to check the dropdown list of workspaces. The shortcut of creating a new workspace by clicking on the "Not Mapped" link can lead to developers creating too many workspaces and causing workspace management to become unwieldy. If the shortcut link were removed, the user would be forced to use the Workspace dropdown. While it can add an extra step to the process, workspaces would be managed more easily, and this would enforce consistency. At the very least, there should be a high-level administrative setting to hide the shortcut link.
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Likelihood to Renew
JetBrains
Due to the performance and productivity benefits we get with Rider, we will continue to use it for the foreseeable future.
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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
JetBrains
Rider is a great IDE with extensive C# refactoring support and .NET-specific knowledge. This is great for building .NET applications but for our purposes, the Unity specific suggestions are really helpful.
JetBrains Rider is great as an editing and debugging environment. It reliably connects to the Unity editor and allows debugging, which some IDEs are not as reliable at doing.
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Microsoft
The thing I like the most is Visual Studio doesn't suffer from Microsoft's over eager marketing department who feel they need to redesign the UI (think Office and windows) which forces users to loose large amounts of productivity having to learn software that they had previously known.
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Support Rating
JetBrains
The support forums and knowledge base are extensive and the JetBrains support staff respond quickly to new posts and help resolve issues. There is also a publicly accessible issue tracking system, which allows you to stay on top of any bug fixes or enhancement requests.
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Microsoft
Between online forums like StackOverflow, online documentation, MSDN forums, and the customer support options, I find it very easy to get support for Visual Studio IDE when I need it. If desired, one can also download the MSDN documentation about the IDE and have it readily available for any support needs.
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Alternatives Considered
JetBrains
Rider is hands down smoother and way less glitchy than Visual Studio Enterprise. There are way more refactoring capabilities and spell check so that your code is readable, maintainable, and easy to follow. Since Rider is cross-platform, our developers are no longer constrained to only using Windows. We can now get a familiar development environment across Mac, Windows, or Linux!
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.
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Return on Investment
JetBrains
  • All people using the same IDE makes it much easier to ramp-up and collaborate
  • Development and maintainment can be done in a more efficient way
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Microsoft
  • We've had hundreds of hours saved by the rapid development that Visual Studio provides.
  • We've lost some time in the Xamarin updates. However, being cross platform, we ultimately saved tons of time not having to create separate apps for iOS and Android.
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