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Add to SafariWhen comparing Visual Studio vs MonoDevelop, the Slant community recommends Visual Studio for most people. In the question“What are the best C# IDEs?” Visual Studio is ranked 2nd while MonoDevelop is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Visual Studio is:
If a project type or a platform is available for C#, it's available in Visual Studio. Some IDEs and code editors may cover some project types, but Microsoft always starts with VS. If you work with a cross-platform technology like ASP.NET MVC, it matters less. If you work with Windows-only technologies like UWP or WPF, you have no choice really.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Official IDE developed by Microsoft
If a project type or a platform is available for C#, it's available in Visual Studio. Some IDEs and code editors may cover some project types, but Microsoft always starts with VS. If you work with a cross-platform technology like ASP.NET MVC, it matters less. If you work with Windows-only technologies like UWP or WPF, you have no choice really.
Pro Free Community edition
Community edition is almost Pro edition, with just a few exceptions. Unlike old Express editions, it supports plugins.
Pro Amazing coverage over languages
Supports many types of C, and java, as well as ruby and python.
Pro Excellent and broad range of plugins
The plugin development ecosystem is very mature and covers a lot of use cases. For example, it is often easy to find a plugin which allows you to have the keybindings of your preferred editor.
Pro Partial cross-platform support
Visual Studio runs on Windows and macOS, so even if you develop on a Mac you can still develop with Visual Studio.
Pro It can run c#, c++, etc.
You can use too many programming lang. And you can select them! Like "I want to do this, not this".
Pro Cloud storage
Your Visual Studio Online account gives you a place to store your code, backlog, and other project data with no servers to deploy, configure, or manage.
Pro Supported by ReSharper and other plugins
Code productivity tools improve code editing experience greatly, provide static code analysis, refactorings, navigation etc. They are considered by many developers as essential.
Pro Fast-paced development iteration
Fast-paced development iteration from the Microsoft team, with new versions and fixes almost every week.
Pro Comes With the .NET Framework
Pro Product backlog
In agile development teams one really needs features such as product backlogs where you can assign features to team mates and track their progress on them. VS provides a web based interface for you to track your team's complete progress on the project.
Pro Fast
Pro Time travel in debugging
Pro Great UI for nugget packages
Pro Flexible to install/adjust payloads
Pro Same excellent Roslyn compiler/editor as VS for Code + powerful debugging tools
Pro Good support and community
Pro sda
Pro Free
MonoDevelop is free to download and use.
Pro Starting up this program doesn't take as long as starting Visual Studio windows 98
Cons
Con Slow & Buggy (on Mac)
Visual Studio can get very slow on Mac... this is partly due to bad UI framework used - GTK. Also, quite buggy and too often have to Force Quit and restart.
Con Professional pricing is a bit steep
The professional edition's pricing is endearing since it costs more than IntelliJ, however, you wouldn't need that if you're not developing for a enterprise.
Con No Linux version
Con Mac version sub-par
The Mac version has the same great Roslyn editor as Win and VS for Code.
Con Too much storage eater for low-end PCs
For a particular task, you need to install workspaces. Workspaces mainly take up to 50 GB.
Con No longer supported (deprecated since 2018)
Starting with version 4.x, Xamarin rebranded MonoDevelop as Xamarin Studio, but only for the Windows version of the IDE.
Stable release
7.6.9.22 / September 21, 2018
Con Bad formatting
MonoDevelop doesn't offer much in terms of autocompletion and code formatting. Most of the time the automatic formatting that MonoDevelop does is annoying and not really compliant with C# guidelines.
Con The MonoDevelop version that ships with Unity is several versions behind
The version of MonoDevelop that ships with Unity is several versions behind the main MonoDevelop branch. It also gets updated very rarely so any annoying bugs that it may have take a lot of time to get fixed.
