When comparing Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) vs DataGrip, the Slant community recommends DataGrip for most people. In the question“What are the best MySQL client applications for Windows?” DataGrip is ranked 5th while Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose DataGrip is:
DataGrip is not a language-specific IDE. It supports a wide variety of languages by default, such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Derby, H2, Sqlite, and many more. You can also specify your own JDBC drivers to get support for additional platforms.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Can work for other databases if Linked Servers are used
Pro Great for SQL Server
Pro Supports multiple languages
DataGrip is not a language-specific IDE. It supports a wide variety of languages by default, such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Derby, H2, Sqlite, and many more.
You can also specify your own JDBC drivers to get support for additional platforms.
Pro Much more powerful than its counterparts
DataGrip is a full-featured IDE for working with databases and SQL. It includes commonly found features in database clients, and offers IDE-specific features beyond that — version control, autocompletion, refactoring support, etc.
Pro Beautiful and customizable UI
DataGrip currently provides two theme options, light and dark. The UI is intuitive to navigate and provides powerful features such as a diagram view of table relationships.
Pro Helps you avoid mistakes
It can catch SQL bugs and suggest ways to resolve them. It will inform of unresolved objects and the use of keywords as identifiers.
Pro Refactoring support
You can refactor SQL code with DataGrip — it resolves all references automatically and when an object/variable is renamed, you can choose to update all references to it in your project.
Pro Powerful data editor
A powerful data editor lets you add, remove, edit, and clone data rows. Navigate through the data by foreign keys and use the text search to find anything in the data displayed in the table editor. All your changes are stored locally and can be submitted at once. Multiple fields can also be edited at once.
Pro Version control support
DataGrip supports a wide variety of VCS tools out of the box so that you can edit, test, and commit changes without ever leaving the tool.
Pro Excellent code completion
DataGrip's code completion is context-sensitive and schema-aware code completion. It will take into account tables structure, foreign keys, and even database objects created in your code.
Pro Cross-platform
Cons
Con Bloated
SSMS eats up a lot of disk space and memory, but Microsoft seems to have addressed the issue in the newest version, quote "The current size of the bundle is less than half of what SSMS 17.x is (~400 MB). The size will eventually grow a little when the IS components are added back to SSMS, but it should not be as large as it used to be."
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/sql-server-management-studio-changelog-ssms?view=sql-server-2017
Con Doesn't natively support other databases
SSMS is aimed at SQL Server.
Use of Linked Servers will give you some access to query other types of DBs using the tool, but this is a workaround.
Con Performance can be slow/sluggish when working with high-volume databases
As with all other IDEs, DataGrip is powerful and thus requires more resources than usual. It can use up to several GB's of memory when working with high-volume databases, and this has an impact on performance if your system is not equipped to handle it.
Con Not user friendly
For incompetent users that do not have any idea what they are doing this, and any similar product will not seem user friendly. For nearly everyone else this is yet another amazing IDE from the JetBrains family; a must have!
Con Expensive
This is an annual subscription with tiered pricing that diminishes a small amount year over year. But there are other much cheaper or free alternatives. This is the premium priced product of the bunch.