Sublime Text vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
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
Sublime TextMicrosoft Visual Studio
Editions & Modules
Business
$80.00
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Sublime TextVisual Studio
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
Sublime TextMicrosoft Visual Studio
Considered Both Products
Sublime Text
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
Sublime is more customizable and one can easily modify a lot of its features. On the contrary Visual Studio only has limited customizability features. Sublime text is also very light and not bloated as opposed to Visual Studio IDE. We also chose sublime because it has much …
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
Sublime Text rarely has an bugs or updates compared to Notepad++, meaning it is always ready to go. Sublime Text has a smarter file recognition system that helps to correctly target directories for new files and choose the correct color highlighting scheme. Compared to …
Visual Studio
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Sublime Text and JetBrains Rider are both great tools, but neither one is developed enough to provide the environment we need right now for software development. Visual Studio IDE lets us debug, create and run unit tests, do performance tweaking and fine-tuning, and program for …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Sublime TextMicrosoft Visual Studio
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Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
Sublime TextMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
9.3
(56 ratings)
9.3
(104 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
8.9
(4 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.3
(11 ratings)
8.8
(15 ratings)
Configurability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Sublime TextMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
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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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
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.
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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
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.
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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
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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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
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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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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Performance
Sublime HQ
It has many handy hacks and shortcuts which enhances its performace.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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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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
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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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
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.
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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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