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Visual Studio App Center (discontinued) vs. Xamarin

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Visual Studio App Center (discontinued)

    Score6.9 out of 10
    N/AVisual Studio App Center was a solution used to build, test, release, and monitor mobile and desktop apps, as well as to continuously monitor real-time performance. The product was discontinued in March 2025, and is no longer available.

    $40

    per month per build concurrency

    Xamarin

    Score6 out of 10
    N/AN/AN/A
    Pricing
    Visual Studio App Center (discontinued)Xamarin
    Editions & Modules
    Builds
    $40
    per month per build concurrency
    Standard Test Plan
    $99
    per month per build concurrency
    Enterprise Test Plan
    $499
    per month per build concurrency
    Xamarin
    Free
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Visual Studio App Center (discontinued)Xamarin
    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
    Best Alternatives
    Visual Studio App Center (discontinued)Xamarin
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Swiftify
    Score9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Azure DevOps
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Android Studio
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Azure DevOps Server
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Swiftify
    Score9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Visual Studio App Center (discontinued)Xamarin
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    7.0
    (12 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Visual Studio App Center (discontinued)Xamarin
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Discontinued Products
    Honestly, it's an all around solution that needs some enhancements. Need to build an app, check! Need to test that app, check! Need to debug that app, check! Visual Studio App Center is a well rounded platform for multiple types of builds and services.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and effort from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, Windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • It supplies the right native integration for test cases both IOS and Android
    • Constant device updates means you are working with the right builds to support product use cases
    • Excels in automated test cases that are easy to implement, monitor, and digest results
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Xamarin allows you to write cross platform code. This allows companies to build apps more quickly by writing less code. Having code abstracted and reused across multiple platforms allows for more testing and less issues overall.
    • The ability to use Visual Studio is a huge plus. Visual Studio is one of the best IDE's available and being able to write cross platforms apps while in a great IDE makes everything less painful.
    • Xamarin is now free with a large company backing. This means that bugs on the platform get fixed more quickly and there is a large community of developers.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • Webview support was lacking
    • User management seems a bit disconnected from the standard Microsoft ecosystem. Almost feels like you are managing local users and sharing access more than an enterprise solution
    • Price could be better
    • Buggy on some of the latest versions of windows
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Forms - not 100% there. Still needs work but is production ready.
    • iOS - sometimes errors can be hard to understand, if they even show up.
    • Insights - Xamarin offers their own crash analytics software. However, it's not perfect and sometimes doesn't pick up crashes.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    The biggest benefit is in integrations and plug-ins, as well as the fact that it's not open source. I know open source is popular, but we have all been on the downside of open source and waiting for things to be voted up or a contribution to fix an issue. This alone makes VSAC a nice solution! Plus, it comes with a complete IDE integration of services, documentation, and is light weight
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • Cut down on time to delivery enhancements and overall builds to users
    • Helps test new proposed releases with ease
    • Cuts down on local build issues as it does do a good job with local development environments as well
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Saves development time and deliver fast.
    • Allows inhouse developers build both Android and iOS application without switching languages.
    • Allows use coding in C# in Visual studio IDE from which we can code in different languages. We don't need multiple IDEs installed
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots