Microsoft Visual Studio Code vs. Spyder

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
Spyder
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Spyder is a free and open source scientific environment for Python. It combines advanced editing, analysis, debugging, and profiling, with data exploration, interactive execution, deep inspection, and visualization capabilities. Spyder is sponsored by open source supporters QuanSight, and NumFOCUS, as well as individual donors.
$0
per month
Pricing
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeSpyder
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeSpyder
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 CodeSpyder
Considered Both Products
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Microsoft Visual Studio Code is more lightweight than most other options, such as Spyder and MATLAB. These other applications provide strong benefits such as a useful user interface that displays information about variables in in your workspace, as well as a window for built-in …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
It is easy to use, has strong community support and add-ons, and lets you organize files in different languages in an easy-to-use, collaborative environment. The main reason I use it is its easy integration with Git and Jupyter notebooks.
Spyder
Chose Spyder
There were generic code editors and I use to have coding error and sometimes it was difficult to manage interpreter with these IDEs. With Ms vs code, there were lot of plugins available that we need to configure before starting writing code. With Spyder no base is supposed to …
Chose Spyder
Everyone advised me at first to use Spyder because it is very easy to use and because it has a simple and easy user interface, and it is easy through it to learn the basics, also because it does not take up much space on the device, and the CPU remains in a normal state
Best Alternatives
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeSpyder
Small Businesses
BBEdit
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Score 9.9 out of 10
PyCharm
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Score 9.2 out of 10
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Vim
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Score 9.4 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Vim
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Score 9.4 out of 10
PyCharm
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Score 9.2 out of 10
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User Ratings
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeSpyder
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(91 ratings)
8.5
(8 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.4
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(8 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
9.7
(23 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeSpyder
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
For low-end devices, it is a very good tool, but for devices that have decent RAM and decent CPU, I would recommend Android Studio for Android dev as it has more features, and for others, I will recommend agile IDEs like Cursor and Anti-Gravity, as they offer higher limits on AI models, and autocomplete is unlimited as well.
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Open Source
Spyder is an open-source Python IDE designed for the movement of data science work. Spyder comes with an Anaconda package manager distribution, so depending on your setup you may have installed it on your machine.
Spyder includes most of the "standard IDE" features you can expect, such as a strong syntax code editor, Python code rendering, and an integrated text browser.
Spyder is used when we want to develop a code that is useful and able to explore proper documentation of the code that has been written. We use Spyder to perform data-related operations like filtration, cleaning, and enhancing the data qualities. There some cases where it is less appropriate like working in an environment, creating dashboards of data visualizations and plots.
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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.
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Open Source
  • Provides wider screen to read and write code and flexibility to adjust size as per requirement.
  • While running the code it provide the variable overview and memory overview
  • Lightweight and easily available in Anaconda Navigator
  • Multiple compilation options are available
  • Works well for data analytics, Django, Flask and Fast API frameworks
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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
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Open Source
  • Colors in code format
  • Add a broadcast to share the project with friends
  • Contains more than one important language such as Python
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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.
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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Usability
Microsoft
It is great for non-mainstream Apple device programming (anything not using Swift or Obj-C). However, it is not as full (some would say overly) featured as Xcode, so sometimes you are looking for a feature that it just doesn't have. The ability to add functionality via plugins is a benefit, but the NEED to add features that way is a drawback. Still in all, a solid "almost" IDE.
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Open Source
It is fairly straightforward to use. Pretty much good to go as soon as you install it. The IDE itself is very user friendly, and it is only limited by whatever limitations Python has as a language. Great for those who want to run their scripts quickly or do some Python programming without fussing.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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Open Source
Most of data scientists or data engineers are either using ec2 on the cloud or Atom or PyCharm locally. It is a bit hard to find people who are still using Spyder and have the sight of the IDE and can help you to answer your question.
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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.
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Open Source
I think Spyder doesn't stack up as well as other IDEs due to its many limitations. But it is available for free and that is one advantage it has over its competitors
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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.
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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
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Open Source
  • It has helped me learn python quickly
  • The ability to generate figures quickly and interact with them is helpful
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ScreenShots