Microsoft Visual Studio vs. Xamarin

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Visual Studio
Score 8.9 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
Xamarin
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
N/AN/A
Pricing
Microsoft Visual StudioXamarin
Editions & Modules
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Xamarin
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Visual StudioXamarin
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 StudioXamarin
Considered Both Products
Visual Studio
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
VS is more resource hungry than it's lighter-weight counterparts, but makes up for it in a much more robust feature set. VS Code and Xamarin both have very limited interactivity ("Go to declaration/implementation," e.g.), and no built-in build or debug features. For C#, …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Xamarin was a great tool, however after it merged with Visual Studio, everything is finally in the same place. XCode is great for Swift/Objective C development, however that's not exactly cross compatible. Visual Studio has a lot of different environment targets and is …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Visual Studio can do what all of these alternatives can do and does them well. PowerApps is RAD and you just can't tweak apps like you can in Visual Studio. Xamarin is now supported in Visual Studio and IntelliJ is javascript which you can create inside of Visual Studio. Would …
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
For .NET development, there are few alternatives. And now that you can develop with Visual Studio for mac and mobile, I don't see any reason to use another IDE.
Xamarin
Chose Xamarin
Xamarin allows us to natively code against IOS and Android as opposed to just putting a Skin over it. Because of this native code stack the performance on Xamarin is off the charts better. You can really see the performance when you are using native phone features like GPS, …
Chose Xamarin
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 …
Chose Xamarin
Apache Cordova is nothing more than a HTML Web VIew App. I've built an app using Cordova and it was a mess. With Xamarin, you get the platform level capabilities, which make the performance, in theory, no different than real native development. Cordova is not suitable for any …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Microsoft Visual StudioXamarin
Small Businesses
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Microsoft Visual StudioXamarin
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(105 ratings)
7.0
(12 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(3 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(2 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(15 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Microsoft Visual StudioXamarin
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Pros
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.
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.
Read full review
Cons
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.
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.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Usability
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.
Read full review
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
Read full review
Support Rating
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.
Read full review
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
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Return on Investment
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.
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
Read full review
ScreenShots