When comparing JetBrains Rider vs MonoDevelop, the Slant community recommends JetBrains Rider for most people. In the question“What are the best C# IDEs?” JetBrains Rider is ranked 1st while MonoDevelop is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose JetBrains Rider is:
ReSharper is a popular Visual Studio Extension for .NET Developers. IntelliJ IDEA is a popular and fully featured JAVA IDE.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro New C# IDE based on ReSharper and the IntelliJ platform
ReSharper is a popular Visual Studio Extension for .NET Developers. IntelliJ IDEA is a popular and fully featured JAVA IDE.
Pro Superior "quality of life" features
Extremely good at filling in all the mindless boilerplate type code while you stay productive.
Pro Fast performant
Rider has everything you want from a serious IDE, but without the bloat. This results in significantly fast performance in day to day operations.
Pro Multiple runtime support
Project Rider supports the .NET Framework and Mono, with CoreCLR support in the works. It also includes templates for creating new projects, and when you create an empty project, it's literally empty
Pro Cross-platform
As well as running and debugging multiple runtimes, Project Rider itself runs on multiple platforms. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Pro Decompile code for any .net library
Pro Version control integration
Intellij plugins for Git, Mercurial, and TFS plus Local History of files.
Pro Supports all the development lifecycle
Project Rider can build MSBuild and XBuild solutions as well as DNX/.NET CLI projects, and allows debugging .NET and Mono applications. DNX/.NET CLI debugging and CoreCLR support are coming.
Pro Excellent UI, Features beyond Visual Studio (File Layout just one example)
Pro Free for Students
With a university email, Rider can be obtained for free.
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 Not free
Project Rider has a trial version available, but is not free.
Con No support for dotTrace, dotMemory yet on macOS
Support is promised on macOS, but currently only available on Windows. This means it’s not ideally suited for performance tracing and debugging.
Con Is RAM hungry
This product can hang a huge amount of RAM memory, up to 4 GB.
Con Relatively young project
Some bugs are to be expected since it's still a relatively young project.
Con Abnormal key maps
Though Visual Studio Key Map can be installed, it is still hard to find where the plugins are installed when one uses it to open a solution for the first time.
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.