Microsoft Visual Studio Code vs. NativeScript

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
NativeScript
Score 4.8 out of 10
N/A
NativeScript is an open source framework that allows you to create native iOS and Android apps, with one codebase, using ​the web skills you already have (JavaScript and CSS) and ​the libraries you already love​.N/A
Pricing
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeNativeScript
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeNativeScript
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsThe NativeScript framework and CLI are completely free and open source. NativeScript Sidekick is a free download to improve developer productivity with optional paid tiers for power users.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeNativeScript
Best Alternatives
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeNativeScript
Small Businesses
BBEdit
BBEdit
Score 10.0 out of 10
Visual Studio
Visual Studio
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Vim
Vim
Score 9.5 out of 10
Visual Studio
Visual Studio
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Vim
Vim
Score 9.5 out of 10
Visual Studio
Visual Studio
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeNativeScript
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(91 ratings)
4.8
(13 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.4
(2 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.1
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.7
(23 ratings)
1.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeNativeScript
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Read full review
Progress Software Corporation
I gotta be honest, after a PoC period, we choose to rewrite the whole application in a different cross-platform app. Our developers had to invest a lot of time and effort to debug a lot of plugin-related issues, which we needed to utilize the android mobile phone capabilities. QR reader, special visualizations, and fine-tuning were really hard and often resulted in writing native Android code instead of using the shared Angular code. In the end, we think that writing a standalone Android app and an Angular app would have been a better alternative, as the shared code base was so unreliable that it did not save us any time.
Read full review
Pros
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
Progress Software Corporation
  • True native app. The app uses native components and that is quite noticeable in the overall performance of the app. NativeScript is also awesome in the way we can access the native APIs, so we are never really constrained by the framework. If we need, we can just dive into the native APIs without leaving our environment and language (JS).
  • Cross-platform. Builds for Android and iOS. It deals with the platforms differences very well.
  • Support for Vue.js. Even though it is just a community effort, the NativeScript-Vue plugin is the best alternative to build native Apps with Vue.js. That was a major factor to go with NativeScript.
Read full review
Cons
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
Progress Software Corporation
  • The need to know the native Android and iOS APIs to access device hardware and other platform-specific functionality
  • Not all user interface components are available for free
  • NativeScript has no HTML and DOM, which requires some deep knowledge of different UI tools to be implemented instead
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
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.
Read full review
Progress Software Corporation
The hybrid is ok but native is better for performance and the right use case I want to go for is the performance without dealing with too many development tools.
Read full review
Usability
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.
Read full review
Progress Software Corporation
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
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.
Read full review
Progress Software Corporation
No answers on this topic
Performance
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).
Read full review
Progress Software Corporation
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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.
Read full review
Progress Software Corporation
The community support is excellent.
They have a slack community as well as a discourse forum
forum.nativescript.org
Both of these offer community driven support.
The forum is more for a threaded discussion. The slack community is more for a quick talk.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
Progress Software Corporation
Ionic Ionic is an excellent Angular-based framework for mobile, and it does give a lot of access to the native device api's. However, the technology is based on Cordova, which means the apps being built are just webviews, with html, css and JS all running on the UI thread, and potentially creating very slow experiences for users. NativeScript is a truly native solution, and so provides a faster user experience. ReactNative We evaluate ReactNative, and found it much the same as NativeScript. The main difference is that your JS is all written with React, while NativeScript lets you choose between normal JS, Angular, and Vue. For our team, Angular was the most appropriate choice.
Read full review
Scalability
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.
Read full review
Progress Software Corporation
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
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
Read full review
Progress Software Corporation
  • The poor quality of NativeScript documentation has the potential to weigh heavily on development timelines, budgets, and QA resources in a NEGATIVE manner.
  • The poor interoperability of NativeScript plugins can significantly increase development time.
  • The need to seek out professional instruction to learn how to use NativeScript effectively may become a burden on your budget.
  • The number of breaking changes between versions of NativeScript, may cause your development efforts to lag further behind the most recent releases of NativeScript and your other chosen environments than you are accustomed to.
  • NativeScript still does not support the latest major version of Angular. Any significant changes to the other environment components of your systems may hold you back even further while NativeScript plays catch-up.
Read full review
ScreenShots

NativeScript Screenshots

Screenshot of Example of a styled NativeScript list viewScreenshot of Charts and graphs available as part of NativeScript UIScreenshot of Groceries – the app you build as part of the getting started tutorialScreenshot of Leverage native mapping systems with NativeScript