TrustRadius Insights for JetBrains Rider are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
Engineers in various industries have adopted JetBrains Rider as their primary IDE for .NET development, citing improved experience and productivity. For game development in Unreal, Rider has provided agility and reliability compared to other platforms. Users highly value the platform's IntelliSense capabilities, including Unreal Macros, and quick search features. In the Unity development community, Rider has become a popular replacement for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and Visual Studio Mac. It is used extensively for both C# code development and debugging in Unity.
Rider has also found a place among backend web API developers utilizing ASP.NET Core. Users have found it to be a suitable alternative to Visual Studio Enterprise, enabling efficient development of web APIs. The IDE is also being used for application deployment and upgrades, including deploying applications into Azure and AWS. Additionally, Rider's compatibility with Linux desktops has made it an easy choice for those who prefer working on this operating system over Windows.
One of the standout features of Rider is its well-thought-out refactorings and code suggestions which contribute to cleaner and more readable code without any performance drawbacks experienced in Visual Studio. Users appreciate the smooth and stable performance of the IDE, allowing them to work without interruptions. The seamless experience provided by Rider includes features like helpful suggestions, database connections, and plugins that not only make tasks faster but also enhance overall code quality.
Overall, JetBrains Rider serves as a reliable IDE for developing, maintaining, and improving software products across a wide range of domains and use cases.
JetBrains Rider is a leaner, smarter version of Visual Studio. It is faster while at the same time demands less from your computer. I have mainly used it for developing .Net websites and used it for Vue frontends. It just works without having to find suitable extensions or plugins. They do have good plugins for the cases where you need them. Just a great option, highly recommend.
Pros
Loads fast
Builds fast
Nice default support of frontend frameworks
Cons
With the new 2025 version of rider, I have seen it becoming slow in typescript heavy applications
Likelihood to Recommend
For all web development it is great. Might be less great when it comes hardware programming with assembly, C etc
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
JetBrains Rider is yet one of the best IDEs in the market, mainly regarding its suggestion on good practices if it is either a visual cue on an early out or suggestions to reduce branching of things like that. That in general is the main reason why I recommend JetBrains Rider for beginners. It has a nice auto-complete feature that helps learners spend more time thinking about their problem then about the language or other details.
Pros
Auto-complete
Improvement suggestions
Nice visual cue for things that can be improved
Well integrated with GitHub Copilot
Cons
Things are starting to get slower as the IDE grows
Blazor integration is a bit lacky
Blazor hot reload could be automatically applied instead of having to click on Apply link/button.
Likelihood to Recommend
I keep recommending more people to use it because I deal with a lot of learners and I believe that is an easier way for them to focus on the problem and not in the language, IDE, indentation, etc. Other features that I love is the renaming feature which is quite useful as well as the “unnecessary using removal” for C#. I also their find reference tab since it keeps multiple instances that I can refer back after or remove items I don’t want on the list o just filter setter and exclude getter (and vice versa).
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
We used it instead of Visual Studio and it’s just perfect. You will never regret paying for the service. It makes your life super easy, from suggestions to database connection to all the plugins it provides. It made everyone on the team work complete tasks faster and with better quality of code
Pros
It’s very fast and the UI/UX part makes it very comfortable to use
It’s cross platform so you can find on Linux and macOS also
It analyses your code exceptionally well and provides very useful feedback
Debugging is just another level compared to Visual Studio, it’s just incredible
Cons
I think there could be more .net related plugins
More theme options like on vscode would be welcome
Would be great if you could write C++ for Unreal Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
Initially you may think it’s not worth paying and that there are better free options, which is definitely a lie we once tried to live with. It has everything you may ever need in .NET world, code analysis and debugging works super well and all the SQL/noSQL related integrations are just next level compared to the competition. It’s worth every penny.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (1-10 employees)
We use Rider for game development in Unreal. There are other development platforms for Unreal but Rider with the new support for Unreal really helped make the development more agile and proved to be the most reliable one. The two main features that other platforms lack are IntelliSense considering Unreal Macros and quick searches, but all the other tools within the platform are great.
Pros
IntelliSense
Quick Search.
Debugging
Code versioning Integrations.
Extendable plugins.
Forum for issues with answer from the developers.
Cons
Startup time. It takes a while to index big projects.
Rarely it loses the intellisense and the only way to get it back is by restarting.
Memory usage for big projects
Likelihood to Recommend
I think it's the best IDE nowadays for game development, mainly in Unreal, but it's also the best one in cost/benefit for Unity. It might not work for people who prefer a more lightweight IDE, it's still pretty heavy and its indexing takes around 2~3GB of ram, but it's worth the quick indexing and IntelliSense.
JetBrains Rider is used as the primary IDE by a number of Unity developers. It is a replacement for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and Visual Studio Mac. JetBrains Rider is used for both development and debugging C# code in Unity.
Pros
Useful C# refactoring suggestions with indications of which options are available for different versions of the C# language
Deep understanding of the Unity game engine, which means that Rider can flag potential problems such as being careful with the use of the null coalescing and null propagation/conditional operators on types that derive from UnityEngine.Object.
Good searching and navigation facilities make it easier to understand unfamiliar code.
Cons
Rider is slower to start up than, for example, Visual Studio Code so I do find myself using Code for quick edits to files.
Rider does appear to be more resource-intensive than Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio.
Likelihood to Recommend
Our experience of JetBrains Rider is that it is very good for both standalone C# applications and for developing Unity games. Its C# refactoring suggestions are useful most of the time, and it also has specific Unity recommendations that are helpful to close the gap between experienced and less experienced Unity developers.
All five of our engineers have adopted Rider as our primary IDE for .NET development, which is our main project. We develop an online, web-based service with components in .NET Framework, .NET Core, and Xamarin. Rider has been a successful alternative to Visual Studio to improve developer experience and productivity.
Pros
Provides a smooth, efficient IDE for developing .NET applications. Performance has been much better than Visual Studio in my experience.
Integrated refactoring tools are really comprehensive and useful.
Integrates with other JetBrains products such as TeamCity, Upsource, dotTrace, etc.
Cons
The debugger tools are still lacking compared to Visual Studio, especially when you consider plugins such as OzCode.
I still keep Visual Studio installed. Sometimes the project won't build correctly, or exhibit strange behaviour. Usually clean, restart, and rebuild addresses actual issues, but I always double check with Visual Studio in such cases.
Versioning can be a bit of a nightmare. There is an official updater, but they tend to leave old versions hanging around and I have found myself accidentally using a previously installed version without intending to.
Likelihood to Recommend
Rider can pretty much be a drop-in replacement for Visual Studio in most scenarios. The development experience is wonderful, and I have rarely had problems with building, running tests, and debugging applications. You might need to keep around Visual Studio to publish or build installers, but the Rider team is constantly adding feature parity and new features, so the future looks even stronger.
<div>I personally use Rider daily instead of Visual Studio Enterprise when I am working on our back end web API that is written in ASP.Net Core. I've also started using Rider instead of Visual Studio for our deployment and upgrade applications, and all the utilities that we write to deploy our applications into Azure and AWS. Since I prefer to use Linux as my desktop, instead of Windows, it was an easy choice to start using Rider. However, after using it, I am now hooked on it and also use it on my Windows desktop when I need to work with Windows applications.</div><div>
</div><div>If you've ever used Resharper in Visual Studio, you will find that the refactorings and code suggestions that it gives you are very well thought out, make your code cleaner and easier to read, and help you write better code. The only problem with this is that it can sometimes negatively affect the performance of Visual Studio, sometimes so much that you have to turn it off if it's a very large project. Rider gives you back those nice refactorings without the performance hit.</div><div>
</div><div>It's smooth, works well, is highly stable, and gets out of my way.
</div>
Pros
Helps you refactor your code into more readable and more efficient code.
Highly customizable UI, including color themes, shortcut key remappings, and the ability to put any Window, Toolbar, or Docked tab anywhere you want, even on second screens. Additionally, this functionality can be customized per project, not just globally for the whole machine.
More control over Git. Visual Studio just has the basics, but mostly all that is needed is for git repositories. It gets the job done., but Rider takes it one step further and gives you most of what you can do on the command line's simple, easy to access menu options.
If you use TeamCity, then you have complete and full integration into your TeamCity build server!
You can double tap your control key and get a quick pop up to instantly run any command. Double tap shift and you can search your entire project, filenames, AND text and filter that search!
Cons
If you are on Linux, it still uses Mono for a few things, such as the interactive C# window. This can be a slight issue if you are in Dotnet Core. While you can get the Dotnet script to work, there is a bug currently in the Dotnet script that doesn't allow the interactive window to work. However, you can run the Dotnet script in a terminal and get the same functionality, just not as easily.
Their built-in performance tools do not work on Linux.
Likelihood to Recommend
Rider works great for all .Net development. For what I am using it for, it's way more performant and stable than full visual studio. It has support for Xamarin (Android and iOS) as well as VB.Net and F#. While I have not done any desktop development, it does support it. However, if you are using some 3rd party UI controls, you may run into some issues getting those control references into the project, and you may still have to use Visual Studio to add them.
