NetBeans vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
NetBeans
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
NetBeans is a free and open source platform and integrated development environment (IDE).N/A
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
NetBeansMicrosoft Visual Studio
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
NetBeansVisual Studio
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
NetBeansMicrosoft Visual Studio
Considered Both Products
NetBeans
Chose NetBeans
I would say NetBeans only shines when it comes to smaller projects. I prefer using Eclipse and Intellij over NetBeans when it comes to developing larger projects.
Chose NetBeans
The biggest pro of NetBeans for us is that it is free and open-source, and this is why we decided to go with it over other similar products.
Chose NetBeans
NetBeans holds its own in comparison to other IDEs. Versus IntelliJ and Eclipse, it's a matter of preference and familiarity.
Chose NetBeans
NetBeans is free, open source and offers a lot of open source plugins. If you don't have money to invest in a proprietary IDE, you can use NetBeans as the main IDE. Also, it's backed up by a great community and Apache so you know that it will receive upgrades and updates to …
Chose NetBeans
Easy to use. Not really proprietary to a single vendor or language.
Chose NetBeans
Both are very good IDE's especially for Java. Both have great integrations. I chose NetBeans because of the better integration with Glassfish.
Chose NetBeans
NetBeans is easier to use. It has a simpler UI and it's more similar with other IDEs than Eclipse. I never liked Eclipse's workspace concept, with NetBeans you just have projects. Overall I would say using NetBeans requires less learning since it's UI is more logical and you …
Visual Studio
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
NetBeans was a tool that offered many features we were looking for our developers. It gave easy configuration options, to set programs in JAVA, HTML/5, PHP. Can be used for all OS, including Linux and Mac. Ended up with VS IDE due to superior features.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Visual Studio provides a variety of plugins which helps coders to code in different programming languages. The speed of the IDE is much faster when compared to other IDE's like NetBeans and Bracket. It helps to keep revisions of the file using source control like Git and …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Visual Studio is better than NetBeans or Eclipse when writing software that will only run on a Windows OS. I would not recommend Visual Studio for writing software running on other OSs.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
I selected Visual Studio IDE because of its fast syntax analysis capabilities, the ease of which I can install, update and remove packages from my application. The IDE comes with an integrated SVC plugin which allows the fast synchronization of my code. NetBeans falls down in …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
I used Eclipse and NetBeans when working as a Java developer. Both IDEs are inferior developer experiences with slower performance and downright chaotic user-interfaces. If the nature of the project would allow adoption of Visual Studio over these alternatives, I would highly …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Compared to a lot of these options (which are free except WebStorm), Visual Studio definitely leads the pack as far as its completeness of feature set. There are deep integrations with the Microsoft ecosystem with Visual Studio that the others can't really compete with, as …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
While I am not a Java developer, I have used NetBeans in the past. I found the NetBeans interface to be more intuitive than the Visual Studio IDE. However, it was also more limited in scope. VS Code, on the other hand, is simplicity itself. It is excellent as just a text …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Eclipse, PyCharm, NetBeans I have used during my internship for smaller applications but to have a full end-to-end application with ease to connect to database and deployment I believe Visual Studio is way better than other available IDE in this space.
Although your options get …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Some of the editors are suitable for a particular programming language . For example PyCharm is suited for Python .
Visual Studio has support for many languages and Visual Studio is comparatively light weight from most of the IDE . The ability to get extensions and use them is …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
The only downside in VS compared to these is that it doesn't hava Java support. If it had i doubt i would have to use any other IDE than VS. Overall it has the largest amount of features and support/integration for different environments, and also has the most friendly UI.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
It's a well [maintained], mature IDE, which has the benefit of being a [software] which only the most skilled developers works on, instead of being open source. It has a lot of very useful features, which most free IDE-s don't. Also, it has many options from commercial …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
The main reason why we can't choose the Visual Studio IDE is that the entity framework provides excellent solutions. Besides, there is a very strong community of users. The Visual Studio IDE has a very user-friendly display. Creating functions and creating classes is much more …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Visual Studio is simpler and very easy to use. It has more features integrated and also contains more platforms to develop (Android, Windows, Web, Data Science, C#, .NET, etc). It has two versions: one is the community version, that is free, and a professional version for …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Because it is the product that offers the most stable synchronization and compatibility in the market with Windows OS, in addition to a graphic environment and a variety of fundamental advanced options.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
There are very few native Windows development IDE these days. We had only evaluated Embarcadero Delphi which is very easy to use, but it looks like a 90's IDE. Other IDE to develop for Windows only offers mostly C++ development (QT).
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
It provides many inbuilt GUI feature that is used to create window applications easily. This tool provides more simplicity and flexibility to build applications as compared to other IDE tools.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Visual Studio is by far the most full featured IDE. I don't think it makes sense for many types of applications but for c# .net applications it is a must. For web development I would use a lightweight application such as Atom, Sublime, or Visual Studio Code.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
It’s the most complete IDE to work with professional coding. As your project develops, the likelihood that you will restructure and refactor codes that you or others have already written will increase. Many languages, such as C #, VB, and now C ++, support powerful built-in …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
I have used NetBeans but it is hard to compare since Visual Studio is more powerful due to its Windows specific nature and more evolved.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
NetBeansMicrosoft Visual Studio
Small Businesses
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.3 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.3 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.3 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
NetBeansMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
7.8
(22 ratings)
9.3
(104 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(2 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.5
(4 ratings)
8.8
(15 ratings)
User Testimonials
NetBeansMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
Open Source
NetBeans is extremely user friendly and easy to start developing complex applications. Adding and configuring external libraries is much simpler than in Eclipse. It is highly cost effective and most of the latest framework based libraries required are automatically downloaded to the projects. The overall tool is also light weight and consumes less memory as compared to other competitor tools.
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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
Open Source
  • Debugging - Save time hunting down errors by stepping through the code to find the root of a problem.
  • Refactoring - Easily rename classes and variables or make other structural changes using built-in refactoring tools.
  • Service management - NetBeans integrates seamlessly with web application servers like Tomcat and GlassFish.
  • Source control - Works well with Git and other version control tools.
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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
Open Source
  • NetBeans [should] work smoothly with systems having less RAM. Systems with less RAM face trouble with NetBeans.
  • File open history also requires improvement. Once NetBeans is restarted, all files are closed automatically and there is no shortcut to open last opened files.
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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
Open Source
No answers on this topic
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
Open Source
Netbeans enhances my coding work, shows me where I have errors and helps find variable instances. I would be lost without find/replace in projects functionality as I use projects as templates for new projects. Occasionally the code hints aggravate me, but I understand that it is actually making me a better coder, working to get the 'green light' of a clean file with no errors or clumsy code.
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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
Open Source
NetBeans has a very strong user community. We can find solutions here for almost all the problems we face. In addition, we can forward NetBeans Support teams the problems we cannot solve. We can get quick feedback from the support teams, but I generally try to solve my problems by following the forums.
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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
Open Source
It works very smoothly as compared to other tools . The problem of restarting and reimporting the projects is not in the netbeans IDE . The front end development features are good . Netbeans connector is one of the best thing which enables us to deeply integrate netbeans IDE with google chrome browser
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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
Open Source
  • By working on Netbeans I just learned one more tool and can teach others about it. One should learn every tool so that it might help someday if another editor is not available and you have to use different software for your work.
  • Compiling code became easy as it is not a feature of normal text editors. Only IDE can do this.
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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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ScreenShots