Microsoft Visual Studio Code vs. Sublime Text

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft offers Visual Studio Code, a text editor that supports code editing, debugging, IntelliSense syntax highlighting, and other features.
$0
Sublime Text
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Sublime Text is a highly customizable text editing solution featuring advanced API, Goto functions, and other features, from Sublime HQ in Sydney.
$80
Pricing
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeSublime Text
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Business
$80.00
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeSublime Text
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 CodeSublime Text
Considered Both Products
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
It's faster than Sublime Text and Atom. I used to use Atom and shifted to Microsoft Visual Studio Code one to two years back. I've never used any other editor after using Microsoft Visual Studio Code.
Atom's installation is long and painful compared to Studio Code's. The …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Sublime Text is strictly a text editor and it is the most robust around in my opinion. It is better than Microsoft Visual Studio Code in this respect, but VS Code has other tools that make using it more streamlined. Brackets has a bit of the weakness of VS Code and Sublime …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
I used Sublime Text in my introductory years for its syntax highlighting and some customization support. Atom quickly grew to a more powerful IDE with their ability for extensions so that was an easy change. I found that Atom didn't run as reliably as I had hoped, and had …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Overall, compared to all other open source text editors like Sublime Text, Vim, etc, I've noticed that the Visual Studio Code has been updated regularly which makes it work more efficiently and resolves any bugs on a continuous basis. I feel like VS Code has the speed like Subli…
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
We moved from Sublime Text. Microsoft Visual Studio Code has similar features, such as a mini view of the document along the right side.

Microsoft Visual Studio Code is also freeware. Sublime Text is $80 per seat, so when you add team members the costs increase.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Compared against a lot of other popular IDEs, I would say that VSCode is the perfect balance between complexity, language support, etc, for web languages. It's faster than most (though not quite as fast as native ones like Notepad++ or Sublime Text), and very flexible. Even in …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
While Sublime Text, another free alternative, is faster and snappier than Code, the extensions that are available on it are sub-par (it doesn't even have an official extension store). This makes using it for any serious work unpleasant, at least to me.

IntelliJ's dedicated IDEs …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
prior to Visual Studio Code, I was using Sublime Text, which was not the most effective in terms of third-party libraries and complex debugging, so I switched to Visual Studio Code where I got a positive as a developer. it is having all the features and third-party libraries to …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
[Microsoft] Visual Studio Code beats the competition due to its extensibility. Their robust extensions architecture combined with the plethora of mostly free extensions written by the community can't be beaten. The fact that this tool itself is provided by a world-recognized …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
All the previously listed are incredible development environments that perfectly fulfill this function, but [Microsoft] Visual Studio Code goes one step ahead by providing flexibility, customization and adaptability to development environments with its own methodology, for all …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
When you start using [Microsoft Visual Studio Code], it lands more on the "text editor" side of the spectrum, akin to Vim/Emacs/Sublime. Aligned with this, it's fast and easy to install and setup, and competes with the best of them as a great general purpose tool. But then it …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
In all honesty, I've not even looked back at any of these alternatives since switching to Microsoft Visual Studio Code a few years ago, there simply isn't the need. For all I know they're all absolutely fantastic, but at the time of switching (and consistently since) Microsoft …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Every IDE has almost the same features but being lightweight is a plus point for the IDE so that you can run on any hardware with good speed. VS Code has ultimate features.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Microsoft Visual Studio Code stacks up favorably against PhpStorm for developing PHP- and JS-based web projects. In our company, developers generally choose from one of these two applications, based primarily on personal taste. Both are great for development and debugging our …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
The main plus for me was the speed, sleek UI, and the memorable shortcuts for VS Code. Also the smart auto-complete as well as version management (Git), Chrome debugging, and the possibility of plugging in multiple language-specific linters for a better code.
The auto-complete …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Microsoft Visual Studio Code does everything better than the previously mentioned software; it improves visual code and overall application visualization. It is easy to use as everything is at hand with shortcuts allowing to improve development time. It is so lightweight that …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
As I explained above, definitely switch to VSCode unless you are heavily invested/comfortable with the alternatives, in which case it may not be worth it for now. Vim users may differ, but did I mention VSCode also has a highly integrated and mature Vim plugin? I used to be a Vi…
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
We evaluated both Sublime and Atom, and while they are both great tools, they did fall short of the one-stop shop that is Visual Studio Code. The integrations with Docker, Live Share, Azure app services all add to making this a single tool for all our needs. Without having to …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
In my opinion, VS Code is the best option for coding. It works on Windows, GNU/Linux, and macOS. Moreover, there's a great team/community behind the scene to maintain this program.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
VS Code feels sometimes heavier compared to other text editors like Notepad++. You can choose windows PowerShell, CMD, bash or node, and the terminal will just be as powerful within the VS Code as it is on it is own. it's free and open source. It's also being updated on a …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
It is more advanced, it has more features and is a lot better than its competitors in terms of everything.
It stands the best among all the similar software of this type.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code has become my preferred text editor. It has a lot of useful features common to IDEs, and it is still quick enough to jot down quick notes or just throw open a blank file for some text manipulation with regex.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
It has everything other editors are offering but you will find so many additions. Sometimes you don't think you need a feature until you start using it and that's the case with VS Code. So many things will pop up and make your life easier. Just because you're used to other …
Sublime Text
Chose Sublime Text
Sublimes text is comparable with the Microsoft Visual Studio Code and NotePad++. However, VS code is far better than [Sublime Text] in terms of the plugins and extensions available in the market. [...] Sublime consumes [...] less memory, compared to the VS code, [which …
Chose Sublime Text
While Microsoft Visual Studio Code has a lot more to offer, it can sometimes be a little too much and get too complicated. I like to keep things simple in text editors which makes Sublime Text my preferred editor. There are a lot of packages that can be installed for Sublime …
Chose Sublime Text
Sublime Text is free and offers a cleaner coding interface. Even if I forgot to save updates to a file, the next time I open it, it's still present. Sublime Text boots faster than the other text editors and is also easy to deploy. Memory consumption of Sublime Text is lesser …
Chose Sublime Text
Compared to any other text editor I've used, Sublime Text has the best user interface. On Macs, Windows, and Linux, Sublime Text makes editing easier. When I couldn't use Notepad++ on a Windows machine, I used Sublime Text instead. My colleagues started using Sublime Text, so I …
Chose Sublime Text
Sublime Text has a bit more flexibility and doesn't take up as much space or memory as some of the larger IDEs. Notepad++ is customizable too, but Sublime Text is better suited for code editing in my experience.
Chose Sublime Text
Visual Studio Code is nice from a development standpoint in that it offers many of the features of Sublime Text with the addition of an integrated terminal. Brackets likewise offers some of the benefits of Sublime Text with some added HTML specific tools. Both of these …
Chose Sublime Text
Visual Studio Code was honestly a tough competitor to Sublime for multi-language projects, and ultimately edged it out for some of the teams I worked with. It's library functionality was far superior, it is 100% open source vs ads, and it has a similar speed. PyCharm and WebStor…
Chose Sublime Text
Before using Visual Studio Code, we were using Adobe Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver worked well back then, but we were amazed at how much faster and more intuitive Sublime Text was. That's the time that we got into SASS, which made things go so much faster and more efficiently. Also …
Chose Sublime Text
I think Sublime is the most efficient text editor in terms of memory usage, especially compared to VSC. However, VSC is feature-rich and has almost all the features of IDE such as debugging tools and IntelliSense. These features are missing in sublime. There are plugins to …
Chose Sublime Text
Sublime Text has a better UI compared to any other text editors I have used. Easier to edit text on Sublime Text, even on Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems.
Chose Sublime Text
The easy to use, user-friendly interface is the feature that I like the most.
Chose Sublime Text
For users who care a lot about performance (and also battery usage), ST3 is going to win almost every time because its natively built on whatever OS you are running on whereas VSCode is built on top of Electron, which is widely known to have poor performance. As an anecdote, on …
Chose Sublime Text
It has tons of plugins, themes, and fonts which help developers write efficient well-tested code. It works with all languages which gives developers [the ability] to choose any language they want to develop applications in. It is easy to use and doesn't consume lot of memory …
Chose Sublime Text
Sublime Text does not provide as comprehensive of a development environment as PhpStorm or Visual Studio IDE. On the other hand, it does not take up nearly as much in system resources, so it is very convenient to use when opening many files or directories for lighter editing. …
Chose Sublime Text
Most programming text editors have everything a programmer needs. There are differences with options/plugins/setup/prices, but I choose Sublime because it is well supported and widely used.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeSublime Text
Small Businesses
BBEdit
BBEdit
Score 8.2 out of 10
BBEdit
BBEdit
Score 8.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Vim
Vim
Score 9.7 out of 10
Vim
Vim
Score 9.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Vim
Vim
Score 9.7 out of 10
Vim
Vim
Score 9.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeSublime Text
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(89 ratings)
9.3
(56 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.4
(2 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(5 ratings)
8.9
(4 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
9.7
(24 ratings)
9.3
(11 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeSublime Text
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
Microsoft Visual Studio Code is highly recommended for the development of systems and / or complex applications entrusted to work teams under a specific methodology, and its use is also recommended for the maintenance of previously developed applications.
It is not recommended as a learning environment for developers with little experience as the learning curve would be too high
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Sublime HQ
My CMS has a small window in which I can edit custom HTML/CSS. It can be expanded some, but not as much as I would like. It also displays all code as dark text on a white background. On a page where I am doing extensive custom coding, it is helpful to see it in a larger window and in a color-coded display so that I don't have to strain my eyes as hard. Especially when I'm trying to scan for specific elements and target issues and so that I don't have to scroll endlessly in a tiny window.
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Pros
Microsoft
  • Very accessible -- it's compatible with all platforms and environments, free to install, and fast to open
  • Strong native support for many languages, and very strong extensibility to provide advanced language features
  • Git integration is top-notch, often displaying a better history, diff, and merge interface that is otherwise available in version control systems
Read full review
Sublime HQ
  • It is very light and boots up instantaneously.
  • It has tons of plugins that will help you to customize sublime entirely according to your needs and thereby is not bloated
  • Package control is really easy to work with and most plugins can be installed in 2 just clicks.
  • Free version has nearly all the features of the paid version.
  • Its User Interface is simple and makes it easy to located many features.
  • It gives you a ton of control over your ide setting through User-settings where you can customize almost everything.
Read full review
Cons
Microsoft
  • Lack of button bar like ones found in Visual Studio.
  • Lack of integrated help that could link to YouTube, Channel 9, or other Microsoft videos on how to learn about features.
  • Integration with Team Foundation Server.
  • Would like to see it having some sort of integration into a Web API testing harness.
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Sublime HQ
  • Plugins are easier to use and less complicated but transferring your license to a new computer isn't as simple as it sounds.
  • Sublime has an automatic file comparison feature, but it's challenging to use and should be improved.
  • Adding the ability to mark or highlight the text with different colors would be an excellent application.
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.
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Sublime HQ
I love this application. It has helped to improve my work. Also, I became so used to the shortcuts that It's hard for me to change to another editor.
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Usability
Microsoft
This is a tool for programmers and it works like many others. If you are in the development world already then you will be sailing in no time with Microsoft Visual Studio Code. It is also great for new developers and it is very easy to use and you can get all the tools you need in one place as you begin to learn.
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Sublime HQ
This is a programmers tool. As such a lot of the features and benefits are lost on a non-technical user. To get the most out of the tool you need to have a basic crash course in how it works and what it can do. The documentation and community are good, but it takes a bit of time to get up to speed.
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Performance
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Sublime HQ
It has many handy hacks and shortcuts which enhances its performace.
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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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Sublime HQ
Never had to use their customer support before. There is ample documentation online so it's straightforward to find a solution to any problem you might encounter. For example, I needed to convert a string of HTML code to a properly formatted HTML file to "modify." Easy to do when there are so many users of the product who have needed to do that same thing before.
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
[Microsoft] Visual Studio Code beats the competition due to its extensibility. Their robust extensions architecture combined with the plethora of mostly free extensions written by the community can't be beaten. The fact that this tool itself is provided by a world-recognized company, Microsoft, free of charge is phenomenal. The goodwill garnered by them is immeasurable. Other tools I've used were missing features or were just too rigid, too complicated, or too unsophisticated for my liking. The fact that VS Code is easy to mold to my will with the right extensions seals the deal.
Read full review
Sublime HQ
We've used both Notepad++ and Atom; both are great but nothing really beats the Sublime Text UI; super intuitive and friendly and does everything you need without overwhelming you with stuff you don't. Other options are free, but for our organization, it was well worth the small license cost for the persistent use of a great product.
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Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • Positive impact on minimizing time wasted by employees with software installation and setup
  • Positive impact on reducing spend on software licensing
  • Positive impact on minimizing time used to manage different applications for different purposes - this performs all of the functions we need in basic coding
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Sublime HQ
  • Sublime Text has helped me to focus on specific tasks, cutting out the clutter that many other IDEs have. As such, it has helped me be a more productive employee because I don't get dazed by hundreds of buttons. I can focus on just the code.
  • Sublime Text is so affordable that it's a no-brainer to have an extra tool in your toolset.
  • The Search features of Sublime Text are so useful that it has saved me a great amount of time compared to using Find & Replace menus in Xcode, Android Studio, or Eclipse.
Read full review
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