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ASP.NET vs Microsoft Visual Studio comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

ASP.NET
Ranking in .NET Development Services
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Visual Studio
Ranking in .NET Development Services
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
102
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the .NET Development Services category, the mindshare of ASP.NET is 11.9%, down from 13.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Visual Studio is 15.9%, up from 14.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
.NET Development Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Visual Studio15.9%
ASP.NET11.9%
Other72.2%
.NET Development Services
 

Featured Reviews

SasidharParupudi - PeerSpot reviewer
Principle Consultant at a outsourcing company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Building reliable web APIs and sites has become faster and development stays well supported
I think Microsoft can make ASP.NET better by catching up with other frameworks by adopting features that are very popular in those frameworks, such as minimal APIs and other innovations. They have introduced Blazor, which is their newer front-end development software framework, but unfortunately, Blazor is not well adopted in the market. However, I feel that they will catch up in the future as Blazor has a lot of potential. In my opinion, there is not anything extra needed immediately for ASP.NET; the framework is self-sufficient and very mature at this stage. The problem lies with wider adoption, as some people are anti-Microsoft and prefer open-source alternatives such as React. Microsoft could potentially do a better job at marketing these solutions, but other than that, the tool has the potential to be used in any enterprise-level applications. I would say the setup process for ASP.NET is relatively simple, but with the latest generation of user management or integration with OpenID, the documentation is not comprehensive in terms of what you can do with the latest libraries. They support many things and have decoupled themselves from their own identity servers, but still need to improve documentation considerably.
PR
Senior Manager, Application Development at PSKW, LLC
Code reviews have become clearer and debugging now improves multi-language API development
I appreciate the debugging capability of Microsoft Visual Studio the most. The tracing of the debugging is what I value. I can use any editor to write the code, but Microsoft Visual Studio has strong capability. Microsoft Visual Studio has good integration with the plugins I want to use, the different types of plugins available for different languages and even JSON. Microsoft Visual Studio has improved significantly. Before, people used to use Notepad and other basic editors. Using the studio gave them the capability to properly debug and find issues. Additionally, it provides good code organization and indentation, as well as color coding for comments. It is very useful, as it gives function descriptions and class descriptions. It is very easy for someone who is not writing the code to understand it when they look at it, as it is very descriptive with proper commenting. I cannot give exact statistics on time saved, but I can provide statistics on quality improvement. The coding standard has been enforced. It has tremendously improved with Microsoft Visual Studio. I would say anywhere between 20 to 50% improvement, depending on which team we are discussing.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature of ASP.NET is its visual side, which makes building Windows forms applications visually efficient."
"Microsoft support is much better than other cloud providers or other industry-standard software vendors at times."
"The most valuable feature of ASP.NET is the support of multiple platforms with ASP.NET Core. Additionally, Azure integrates well with ASP.NET and Visual Studio."
"While using ASP.net, we can create interactive websites."
"If I needed to build a new site from scratch, and was able to use IIS7, it would be extremely likely that I would choose ASP.NET MVC."
"It is completely, positively, and positively assisting us."
"Our experience has been very positive and we are satisfied with what we have."
"The solution has good scalability."
"I like the performance, stability and ease of use."
"They've really gone the 9-mile to accommodate not only corporate or big companies, but small, single users to utilize the community issue or business vehicle, and to develop and build on application."
"Microsoft Visual Studio has positively impacted my organization because it's very easy to use, very easy for the people to pick up on, and we can all have the same configuration or personalize it as needed."
"Collaboration grew through the implementation."
"Visual Studio's best feature is debugging, which isn't available with any other Microsoft development tool."
"The versatility and platform coverage of Microsoft Visual Studio make it a standard and stable product across Linux, Windows, and Mac, providing countless features, being lightweight, and offering extensive extensions coverage as a one-stop shop no matter the platform or language I use."
"Microsoft Visual Studio is an excellent product."
"Visual Studio's collaborative features with Azure DevOps are valuable to us, as they allow various team members to collaborate on the same project, maintain consistency, and deliver products that fulfill client promises."
 

Cons

"Performance is an area that can always be improved."
"It should be open source or deployable to any operating system so that the dependency can be removed."
"Not best for SEO out of the box."
"There used to be IAF, which you could spin on a Windows machine. However, that sort of setup does not exist for Linux machines. Because customers still prefer a Windows underlying infrastructure, it can get expensive."
"The solution is out of date and should not be used."
"But the con is that every year they are launching a new technology, and for a company like us, we get confused about which version should be used."
"The solution needs to support its framework on all devices used for mobile application development."
"Frequent version upgrade make you feel outdated unless you keep yourself updated"
"Additional components such as add-ons could be included in the installation packages."
"Microsoft Visual Studio could improve by making it faster. Every time they add a new feature or plugin it slows it down. They should allow the user to turn off features they do not use."
"Microsoft Visual Studio can improve by bringing back designers. They used to have designers for architecture charts and diagrams. They were able to do things, such as database design. If they can bring them back, it would be great."
"Technical support can be slow to respond at times."
"I would like to see more tools in the next release."
"It would be great if they added some extra support for other languages that are available in the market and prepared it for the, let's say, crypto developers as we are going in the age of cryptocurrency."
"Based on my experience and my colleagues' feedback, I believe a potential area of improvement for Microsoft Visual Studio could be incorporating more AI, as it makes things easier for us, and having more intelligence in the tool would be beneficial."
"Sometimes crashes happen and occasionally there might be hanging issues."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"ASP.NET is an open-source solution."
"The solution is comparatively cheaper, and you don't have to pay anything for a developer license."
"The pricing is somewhere in the middle. Not too expensive, but not the cheapest either."
"The solution requires a licensing fee but is worth the investment."
"I think ASP.NET, in deployment, is something that's quite costly when you're on a cloud provider such as Azure, and you have to pay the server cost. On average, it can cost approximately $1,000 per month to host a good site with a few databases."
"The solution is open source and free."
"The solution is free to use."
"This is a free solution. However, we have some server licensing costs which are not directly a cost of using the solution."
"I use the open-source version of Microsoft Visual Studio."
"Visual Studio Team System is expensive, but it is worth the money."
"Microsoft Visual Studio is free. It's freeware, so you don't have to pay for its license."
"You have to be a subscriber with a Visual Studio subscription to use the solution and the organization has to purchase a license that's linked to the account."
"We purchased an expensive enterprise version of Microsoft Visual Studio."
"Our purchasing department pays a fair price for it."
"We have an enterprise-level license. The cost is expensive for small to medium-sized organizations."
"The cost of using Microsoft Visual Studio is approximately $1,700 per user."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Performing Arts
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
15%
Performing Arts
10%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business36
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise50
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ASP.NET?
Our solution is deployed in a hybrid setup; we have some on-site on a private cloud and some on Azure. Most of our costing comes from database licensing, as we use SQL Server, which has very costly...
What needs improvement with ASP.NET?
With the Aspire project, the community is working well on third-party tools for integration, but as a framework, it is solid for almost all normal use cases. For some advanced use cases, I do not s...
What is your primary use case for ASP.NET?
I am mainly developing backend solutions, microservices, and monolithic web backends with ASP.NET.I tried Angular and Blazor; I worked with Angular a long time ago, but I worked with a small projec...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Visual Studio?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that since we install it directly from downloads, the cost is minimal. If we have a Microsoft Visual Studio enterprise license, I'm not sure...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Visual Studio?
I think Microsoft Visual Studio is good at the moment. When I think of additional improvements, I would like to have the ability to use Claude in my Microsoft Visual Studio account since I believe ...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Visual Studio?
My main use case for Microsoft Visual Studio is for writing code. Since I'm a data engineer, projects I work on using Microsoft Visual Studio are related to data engineering. We have GitHub or Bitb...
 

Also Known As

No data available
MS Visual Studio
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Kienzle Automotive GmbH, Sumitomo Rubber Industries, Vengo Labs, Oneview Healthcare, BookedOut, Ministry of Rural Development, Grupo WRR
Knab, Hamburg Port Authority, Kecioren Municipality, National Instruments, Hamburg Port Authority, Government of Odisha, Kongsberg Maritime AS
Find out what your peers are saying about ASP.NET vs. Microsoft Visual Studio and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.