Syncfusion® Essential Studio® vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
Score 6.1 out of 10
N/A
Syncfusion Essential Studio is a suite of 1,900+ software components and frameworks for developing web, mobile, and desktop applications. Its UI controls are designed to be flexible and are optimized for high performance. Syncfusion enables users to speed the creation of modern user interfaces and read and write common file formats. Syncfusion states they have supplied components to 1 million+ developers across more than 30,000 organizations around the world, and the company offers…
$395
per month
Visual Studio
Score 9.1 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
Syncfusion® Essential Studio®Microsoft Visual Studio
Editions & Modules
Team License - Up to 5 developers
$395
per month
Team License - Up to 10 developers
$695
per month
More than a team of 10*
Customized Quote
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Syncfusion® Essential Studio®Visual Studio
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Detailso A subscription license that covers a team of up to 5 members is available for $395 per month. Transferable annual license with unlimited deployment. Includes a license management portal. o A subscription license that covers a team of up to 10 members is available for $695 per month. Transferable annual license with unlimited deployment. Includes a license management portal. o For teams of more than 10, the Syncfusion sales team can prepare a custom quote. o Syncfusion offers subscription licenses that are suited to every organization's structure and needs. In addition to the Team Licenses described above, Project, Division, and Global subscription licenses are also available. Last updated: January 28, 2025 
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Syncfusion® Essential Studio®Microsoft Visual Studio
Considered Both Products
Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
It displays Word documents in most accurate way.
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
Syncfusion beats the other because they have a great licence option for small companies.

For big companies with decent budgets, I find Kendo easier to use but it's only a matter of taste
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
Radzen seemed like a quality product but we needed more control over the interface than they could allow. I don't recall the details about Telerik and Kendo. I think Telerik also rated high but was more expensive?
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
Devexpress was late in developing Blazor controls so we refocused on Syncfusion. As I mentioned, Syncfusion has much better financial support for small businesses.
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
I only used open source tools, as every other solution offered by companies are paid and they don`t offer any free license. Like I said before, the free license for developers and small businesses is a amazing feature that Syncfusion provides and they are the only one that do …
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
Yes, I use another framework at the same time. I am going to be very honest: the other framework is very good. There are two aspects, one positive and other negative: - The positive aspect of the other framework is the execution time. Is more faster than Syncfusion Essential …
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
Infragistics Ultimate UI - less versions, lack of Office document processing, few UI frameworks missing, worse ROI
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
Firstly, there is a free version for small businesses and it allows you to jump start without risk. I found one of the other products a bit short in the number of out-of-the-box supported events handlers for each control and, although you can manually add them, I feel more …
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
Telerik is similar in content and functionality. I used it for 1 yr and switched to Syncfusion based on price. I have never considered going back to Telerik
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
I think variability and rich features and variable to connect to the business need.
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
For the past eight years, we have not evaluated any other products, as we have found our current solution to be highly effective and have had no reason to consider alternatives.
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
The free community license is a major element, but it also allowed a fast start with minimal learning curve compared to adopting alternative solutions.
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
Quite same but that documentation... Keep it as good as it is now.
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
Syncfusion is a clear winner over what Telerik has to offer in functionality, rapid development and hands down on support. I disliked how Telerik decides if they will fix reported bugs or suggested product enhancements. Syncfusion in my opinion is far more cost effective as …
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
We evaluated DevExpress and two other libraries, whose names I've currently forgotten. But in the end, it was a race between DevExpress and Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition, as they both offer a great amount of components with rich documentation. In the end we …
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
We are using this to developed windows form and I am fully satisfied with their performance and speed up development.it also provides easy to integrate with visual studio.it can also support vb.net, asp.net, MVC, and .net core web applications with a responsive user interface …
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
We have tried Infragistics and DevExpress and didn't have the variety of components that we needed
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
Currently using it but we will do more research on D3
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
They are basically on par, but the docs and in general, including support, Telerik is a bit superior. I find it to be better in terms of user-friendliness and also better polished UI wise, I mean, overall they just look better and offer somewhat better themes/skins to all the …
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
While both are great, Syncfusion® Essential Studio® offers Community License rather than a limited period Evaluation/Trial license.
Chose Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
The products mentioned are not really in the same category as Syncfusion. As far similar type of products are concerned, we haven't used others. We have evaluated for sometime but did not use. The main reason was the support service.
Visual Studio
Chose Visual Studio
For beginners, the other tools are easier to set up and run. It is also entirely customizable, but Visual Studio Code has more plugins that allow you to streamline your work.
Chose Visual Studio
MATLAB and QT are way more different than Visual Studio. Despite of being famous as per their IDE environment, they would not stand much comparison with VS Visual Studio IDEs. because, MATLAB and QT are limited edition and feature related Visual Studio IDEs, and they stick to …
Chose Visual Studio
We choose Visual Studio IDE because it is easier to set up with C# and more stable. Each time we use Eclipse to make a program, we had bad behavior. Maybe that was our computer setup but we finally go with something more stable and more useful for our company.
Chose Visual Studio
Visual Studio is somewhat different from LiveCode. LiveCode is a coding platform that is unique and implemented most often by colleges, universities, and other academic institutions. It is more of a coding language than a team-collaboration resource. However, the LiveCode …
Chose Visual Studio
It contains everything a developers wants--starting from a basic terminal to millions of extensions. It's the best solution for developers.
Chose Visual Studio
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, …
Chose Visual Studio
It's a well [maintained], mature IDE, which has the benefit of being a [software] which only the most skilled developers works on, instead of being open source. It has a lot of very useful features, which most free IDE-s don't. Also, it has many options from commercial …
Chose Visual Studio
Some of the editors are suitable for a particular programming language . For example pyCharm is suited for Python .
Visual Studio has support for many languages and Visual Studio is comparatively light weight from most of the IDE . The ability to get extensions and use them is …
Chose Visual Studio
Eclipse, PyCharm, Netbeans I have used during my internship for smaller applications but to have a full end-to-end application with ease to connect to database and deployment I believe Visual Studio is way better than other available IDE in this space.
Although your options get …
Chose Visual Studio
I can't compare the NetBeans or PhpStorm with Visual Studio IDE due to entirely different use. All software development IDEs holds their importance, but Visual Studio IDE is the best among its competitors--the IntelliSense and standardization of development, in particular,are …
Chose Visual Studio
Visual Studio IDE is on par with Rider. There are some code insights and package management that Rider does better, but it's the debugger and profiling I find more powerful in Visual Studio IDE. I also consider the UI in Visual Studio IDE to be more appealing and intuitive to …
Chose Visual Studio
The main reason why we can't choose the Visual Studio IDE is that the entity framework provides excellent solutions. Besides, there is a very strong community of users. The Visual Studio IDE has a very user-friendly display. Creating functions and creating classes is much more …
Chose Visual Studio
While I mentioned that Visual Studio IDE could be slow, it isn't as slow as Eclipse by any stretch. While Eclipse is free, time is money, so take your pick. I once picked up JetBrains as I heard some good stuff about it, but it felt really buggy. It wasn't worth veering away …
Chose Visual Studio
Visual Studio was my preferred IDE before Rider became mature enough to replace it. Rider's performance, source control tools, and built-in refactoring make VS limited to specific use cases where Rider doesn't support.

Chose Visual Studio
While I am not a Java developer, I have used NetBeans in the past. I found the NetBeans interface to be more intuitive than the Visual Studio IDE. However, it was also more limited in scope. VS Code, on the other hand, is simplicity itself. It is excellent as just a text …
Chose Visual Studio
Visual Studio IDE is a much more comprehensive package with a lot of libraries that come out-of-the-package, compared to its rivals/alternatives who have some specialization and niche areas. Due to this nature, it is possible to develop any kind of software, using almost all …
Chose Visual Studio
Visual Studio Code is a very nice lightweight IDE (if you can call it that), that can be used at types of business (small to large). However, since you have to trust the sources of your plugins it can be a little more nerve-wracking at larger businesses to use this tool. Also, …
Chose Visual Studio
Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio are both great tools. VS Code is much "lighter" and therefore faster when opening solutions. So I tend to use both depending on the use case. If I'm developing a spa app or just want to open a solution for review I'll use VS Code. If I …
Chose Visual Studio
No added value. If Visual Studio costs too much then I see the point. But otherwise there is just no need for any other tool. IntelliJ is a mess, buggy and counter intuitive. Or maybe it's because java is not a particularly cool language...
Chose Visual Studio
Compared to a lot of these options (which are free except WebStorm), Visual Studio definitely leads the pack as far as its completeness of feature set. There are deep integrations with the Microsoft ecosystem with Visual Studio that the others can't really compete with, as …
Chose Visual Studio
I work mostly in C++ so CLion from Jetbrains is a nice alternative...but it just doesn't stack up to Visual Studio. My paid version of VS meets all of my development needs and has done so for more than two decades so I see no reason to look any further. That said, I have looked …
Best Alternatives
Syncfusion® Essential Studio®Microsoft Visual Studio
Small Businesses
React
React
Score 9.3 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
React
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Score 9.3 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
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Score 9.3 out of 10
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User Ratings
Syncfusion® Essential Studio®Microsoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.2
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.3
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Syncfusion® Essential Studio®Microsoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
The datagrid is probably their most popular control I would think. It is so flexible and configurable. Most of mine are plain views in ASP.NET Core, but I have a whole bunch that are dynamically created at runtime in my controller. That is so powerful.
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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
  • Integrates well into Microsoft tech stack. i.e. ASP.NET, Blazor etc. So it acts as a plug-n-play, which is great!
  • Shrinks the development cycle without adding too much of its own ecosystem overhead.
  • Provides different UI skins so the controls don't appear as "stitched".
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  • Rock solid intellisense. For C# and VB.Net code, the intellisense provided by Visual Studio is hands down the best. If you find that you have a hard time remembering parameters of functions, or what object names were, the intellisense will rescue you and help me be an efficient developer.
  • Super fast and simple to use debugger for C# and VB. Everything in the debugger is handed to you on a silver platter. When you stop on a break point, it immediately shows you the local variables, the call stack, and even your current memory usage. Setting up watch variables is super simple and you can even make breakpoints conditional so it will only stop on certain conditions.
  • Hides the tedious tasks. There are quite a few things like publishing, creating click once deployments, and adding/removing settings in the project files that can be really time consuming when trying to do it by hand (such as if you don't have access to Visual Studio and you need to make changes). Visual Studio hides all the tedium from you by making nice point and click interfaces to get things done quickly.
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Cons
  • Most complex activities (beyond the out of the box examples) require a very extensive knowledge of javascript. This is not really a short coming of the product but rather a reality for the user who is trying to fully utilize the capabilities of the software.
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  • 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
It takes effort to include a new component library into existing software, especially in our case where we have 5 large applications that are written and maintained by about 100 developers. So changing such a core thing comes with a lot of effort. The other reason we will very likely renew our use of Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition is that it works really well and has helped us to speed up the development process.
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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
I would rate Syncfusion® Essential Studio® a 10 out of 10 for overall usability. The components are intuitive to implement, with clear APIs and consistent design patterns across the suite. This makes it easy for developers to get started quickly and reduces the learning curve even when working with new controls.
In addition, the documentation and sample projects provide practical guidance that helps accelerate development. The built-in customization options also allow us to adapt the components to fit our branding and business requirements without excessive effort. Overall, the usability is one of the key reasons why Syncfusion has become an essential part of our development toolset.
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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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Support Rating
Although I have decades of software development experience, I had never created a website from scratch before, and my html and css skills are not particularly strong. Between documentation and incredible dedication from the support team they helped me overcome all of my challenges. It's amazing that they typically create sample code for most of the issues that I submitted. On rare occasions where I uncovered a defect they kept me informed as to its status, and typically resolved it in a short-term release, and/or gave me a reasonable workaround. They hopped on zoom calls with me on multiple occasions when necessary.
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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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Implementation Rating
Feedback from the team has been very positive.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Firstly, there is a free version for small businesses and it allows you to jump start without risk. I found one of the other products a bit short in the number of out-of-the-box supported events handlers for each control and, although you can manually add them, I feel more comfortable to just have them ready. After using the free version I just felt in love with Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition controls and decided to stay with them; they have all I need and more. The usage of Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition controls is straightforward and intuitive. Support is world-class even for the free version; you get answers in 24 hours at most. Also, the support team is ready to remotely connect to your project in case it is needed; we have had one situation like this, and the issue was solved.
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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
  • First of all, I think the best positive impact is the reduce of time development. I do not know exactly how much time, but certainly, using the framework we save a lot of effort and time.
  • About negative impact, sometimes using the controls of the framewrok have a signifcant impact in the execution time and page load.
  • And of course, the use of Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition has a significant impact of the learning of javascript and JQUERY.
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  • Using the integration between Visual Studio and our source control service, the cost of re-work and losing code is drastically reduced.
  • Paid versions of Visual Studio enable developers to be so much more productive than hacked-together open source solutions that it's hard to imagine developing in Windows without it.
  • When combined with support subscriptions and the vast array of free online help options available, Visual Studio saves our developers time by keeping them coding and testing, not wasting their time trying to guess their way out of problems or spend endless hours online hoping to find answers.
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ScreenShots