Alternatives to Visual Studio
Microsoft's integrated development environment for .NET, C++ and Windows development, with a free Community edition. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Visual Studio
Microsoft's integrated development environment for .NET, C++ and Windows development, with a free Community edition.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Visual Studio.
Qt Creator
A cross-platform IDE for building C++ and Qt applications, maintained by the Qt project.
Qt Creator is an open-source cross-platform IDE for C++ and Qt applications, without Visual Studio's .NET tooling.
CodeLite
A free, open-source cross-platform IDE for C, C++, Rust, Python, PHP and Node.js.
CodeLite is a free, open-source IDE for C, C++, Rust, Python, PHP and Node.js on Windows, macOS and Linux, with a smaller plugin ecosystem and no .NET focus.
KDevelop
A cross-platform open-source IDE from KDE for C, C++, Python, QML/JavaScript and PHP.
KDevelop is a free KDE IDE for C and C++ with CMake support on Windows, macOS and Linux, lacking .NET development tools.
Code::Blocks
A free, plugin-based IDE for C, C++ and Fortran with a consistent interface across platforms.
Code::Blocks is a free plugin-based IDE for C, C++ and Fortran on Windows and Linux, with long gaps between major releases.
Theia IDE
An open-source IDE for desktop and browser from the Eclipse Foundation that runs VS Code extensions.
Theia IDE is an open-source Eclipse Foundation IDE for desktop and browser that runs VS Code extensions from Open VSX.
Apache NetBeans
An open-source IDE for Java, PHP, JavaScript, HTML and other languages from Apache.
Apache NetBeans is free and open source under Apache-2.0 and cross-platform, but focuses on Java and PHP rather than .NET and C++.
Cursor
An AI code editor built on VS Code, with coding agents that plan and carry out tasks.
Cursor is a VS Code-based AI code editor on macOS with coding agents, replacing a full IDE with a lighter editor and hosted AI features.
Also worth comparing
These listings name Visual Studio as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
Android Studio
Google's official IDE for building Android apps, based on IntelliJ.
Visual Studio is Microsoft's Windows-only IDE focused on .NET and C++, with a free Community edition, and lacks Android Studio's official Jetpack Compose and Android tooling.
CLion
C and C++ IDE with CMake integration and deep static analysis.
Visual Studio gives C++ developers IntelliSense and an integrated debugger with a free Community edition, but it runs only on Windows and is proprietary.
Eclipse IDE
Long-established open-source IDE with a very large plugin marketplace.
Visual Studio is a Windows-only proprietary IDE focused on .NET and C++, with a free Community edition and a large extension ecosystem.
Rider
Cross-platform .NET IDE combining ReSharper analysis with a full IDE.
Visual Studio is Microsoft's .NET IDE with a free Community edition, but it runs only on Windows instead of Rider's Windows, macOS and Linux.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
.NET
Microsoft's free, open-source, cross-platform runtime and SDK for building apps in C#, F# and Visual Basic.
Xcode
Apple's IDE for developing, testing and distributing apps for all Apple platforms.
LLVM
A collection of modular compiler and toolchain technologies, including the Clang C and C++ compiler.
GDB
The GNU Project debugger for inspecting running or crashed programs written in C, C++, Rust and more.
PhpStorm
A commercial JetBrains IDE for PHP, with built-in JavaScript, TypeScript and SQL support.
