PhpStorm vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
PhpStorm
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
JetBrains supports PhpStorm, an integrated development environment (IDE).
$9.90
per month per user
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
PhpStormMicrosoft Visual Studio
Editions & Modules
For Individuals
$99
per year per user
For Organizations
$249
per year per user
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PhpStormVisual Studio
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
PhpStormMicrosoft Visual Studio
Considered Both Products
PhpStorm
Chose PhpStorm
PhpStorm has a free trial. Visual Studio IDE does not. I believe that VSIDE is better suited for C+/.NET development and not PHP. Despite their PHP plugins & debugger, stepping through the code on PhpStorm always feels better and more intuitive than stepping through PHP with …
Chose PhpStorm
PhpStorm is the most complete IDE for PHP that I have used. It is stable and solid, and it works on all platforms. There are some editors that are quicker loading, Sublime Text, Notepad ++, but they don't have the depth and solid foundation that PhpStorm has. This is why we …
Chose PhpStorm
PhpStorm compares comparably to Visual Studio for a PHP development environment. It is the most powerful editing environment I have come across for PHP. Having a background in C#, it feels much closer to and similar in power to VS. Has many of the same built in functions …
Chose PhpStorm
It has support for almost any third party tools that you'll use for PHP development. You have a great support for employees and it's always being updated so it supports the latest technology.

Visual Studio
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
PhpStormMicrosoft Visual Studio
Small Businesses
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
PhpStormMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(13 ratings)
9.3
(104 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
9.4
(3 ratings)
8.8
(15 ratings)
User Testimonials
PhpStormMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
JetBrains
PhpStorm is well suited for any project that utilizes PHP. I have used it on Windows, Ubuntu, and Mac OS and it works great on all those platforms. Having a solution that keeps the developer from having to constantly switch tools to do their job is invaluable. Whether you're a junior developer, front end engineer or a senior developer, PhpStorm is a great product that will help you get your work done.
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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
JetBrains
  • Database browsing, Remote host browsing, and all the deep seated customizations for both the UI and Technical feasability are the result of an amazing integrity and compatibility with most components and technologies.
  • The built-in shell is insanely helpful for traversing code in order to debug scripts with ease, and the plug-in system makes this software quite extensible.
  • Not to mention the variety of options and settings (divided into global settings and per-project settings) are both intuitive & easy to use, especially the fact that I can export and import them across my workstations while maintaining my spacing & indentation, highlighting, inspection patterns and syntax styling.
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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
JetBrains
  • There is a bug sometimes, when you pull that the directory structure it forgets all the folders
  • It's not free
  • When I copy paste the default is to not keep the same spacing/tab pattern of the original, which I'm not a fan of
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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
JetBrains
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
JetBrains
The UI is very easy to understand. From common to less common, with the search feature, you can find anything you are looking for within the software. For me, that makes it tremendously easy to use.
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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
JetBrains
The JetBrains community is all about helping others succeed, even in the most obscure setups. I have never had a question go unanswered, or I have never been able to come up with empty results in searching for the answer. My questions or concerns are typically address from other users in the community, so timing is pretty quick for a response
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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
JetBrains
Two things were decisive for choosing PhpStorm, and the first was the Education version since we were a university we were able to license for free, and the other was that we just had to use a single tool to develop our activities (coding, versioning), and operations in the DB). Another point was that the application is cross-platform.
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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
JetBrains
  • PhpStorm decreased the time to market of new features - we are following the Agile SCRUM methodology with 2 weeks sprints. Using PhpStorm helped with releasing UI features even faster than 2 weeks.
  • Considering the price of the license and the cost of the server where we run it, the ROI is still high due to less time spent by developers with writing code, debugging, refactoring etc. Especially when you have highly paid developers.
  • Increased people's happiness - by using a modern tool with lots of features which has made their work easier.
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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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