When comparing Xamarin vs MonoDevelop, the Slant community recommends MonoDevelop for most people. In the question“What are the best tools for making a cross-platform application?” MonoDevelop is ranked 6th while Xamarin is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose MonoDevelop is:
MonoDevelop is free to download and use.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Xamarin Insights and Test Cloud increase user experience
Pro Cross-platform
Apps built with Xamarin can run natively on Android, iOS and Windows Mobile. Xamarin compiles the same C# or F# codebase to native code that runs on several platforms.
Pro Open source
The Xamarin SDK is free and open source and released under the MIT license.
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 Build time tends to be longer than Android Studio
Con Slow to implement new features; must wait 1+ month to be able to access it
Con UI editing and creation is unstable
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.