Microsoft Visual Studio Code vs. React (React.js)

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
React (React.js)
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
React or React.js is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. React enables users to create interactive UIs.
$0
Pricing
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeReact (React.js)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeReact (React.js)
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
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeReact (React.js)
Considered Both Products
Microsoft Visual Studio Code

No answer on this topic

React (React.js)
Chose React (React.js)
I have also used Angular before coming to React. Web apps created with React are much faster than Angular because React is based on virtual DOM which reloads only those components of the web page that change and everything else remains the same. Angular's learning curve is also …
Best Alternatives
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeReact (React.js)
Small Businesses
BBEdit
BBEdit
Score 10.0 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Vim
Vim
Score 9.5 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Enterprises
Vim
Vim
Score 9.5 out of 10
Sencha
Sencha
Score 6.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeReact (React.js)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(91 ratings)
8.0
(14 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.4
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.1
(8 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
9.7
(23 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
User Testimonials
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeReact (React.js)
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
Open Source
React is a JavaScript user interface construction library that works well for:
  • Developing web apps with dynamic and complicated user interfaces.
  • creating reusable UI elements that may be used in other applications.
  • creating single-page applications with dynamic content updates that don't require a page reload.
  • The Virtual DOM's effective updating mechanism allows it to handle large volumes of data updates.
React, on the other hand, might be less suitable for:
  • Websites that are simple, stagnant, and have no interaction. Other libraries or simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript may be a better fit in such circumstances.
  • Web sockets may be a better choice for applications that need real-time updates, such as chat or gaming apps.
  • When creating mobile apps, React Native is a better option.
  • Server side rendering only, as React is designed to run on the client side.
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
Open Source
  • React is fantastic for building performant user interfaces. Our web app is snappy and great for our customers.
  • React has the philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well which is the view layer of the application. This makes it incredibly intuitive and flexible for developers to use.
  • React has lead the way in being able to write modular and structured code. It is a drastic improvement since the days of spaghetti jQuery code.
  • React has an unmatched community. The amount of tools and libraries available is fantastic, and there plenty of solutions available online for common problems.
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
Open Source
  • Debugging React is challenging. Bugs in react code generate stack traces internal to React and it is often totally unclear how it relates to the code you actually wrote.
  • Relating your React elements to corresponding DOM elements is difficult. The intentional separation of virtual and actual DOM also makes it difficult to map the elements to the structures in the DOM. This is partially ameliorated by the use of the React dev tool, which provides a DOM-like view of the React elements, but the tool still does not provide a direct correspondence with the DOM that is often necessary to figure out why something isn't right.
  • Because JSX is React-specific and not a language feature, a special compilation process is necessary to convert JSX code to normal JS. Coming from a C++ background, compiling things doesn't bother me, but many JS developers are used to a less structured development.
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
Open Source
No answers on this topic
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
Open Source
React is just a bit of a different animal. I was avoiding it for the longest time. I thought for sure I would land on Vue or something else with a more approachable and familiar appearance. But after taking an online course in React, I started realize what people were raving about (and complaining about) and decided to implement it at our office for one of our products.
Read full review
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
Open Source
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
Open Source
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
Open Source
Since it's open-source and very popular, the community support for React and related tools and libraries is excellent. There are a lot of people using the same tools, and so issues tend to get fixed quickly and "recipes" are easy to come by. And since it's backed by Facebook, they have a dedicated engineering team working on the progression of React.
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
Open Source
While this is a widely contested debate with various blog posts and benchmarks all over the place, its really a personal choice to determine what works for the team. Coming from a Angular 1.x background, I decided to try a new framework when Angular 2.x was announced and at that time React is gaining popularity and Vue hasn't taken off yet. Compared to Angular 1.x and Vue (hybrid of React and Angular) that split the logic from the html templates, I loved the way React breaks code into components using the jsx syntax. In my mind, this allows for cleaner components and easier maintenance
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
Open Source
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
Open Source
  • Our web applications now run much faster because the whole page doesn't reload
  • We spend less time developing UI components because a lot of them are readily available on NPM
  • We don't have to optimize apps for multiple browsers since React natively supports it.
Read full review
ScreenShots