Around two years ago I was on a really small team, just two or three developers, and the other developer decided they wanted us to use Rider. Because I didn’t have a preference, I used Rider and rather enjoyed it. However, that developer has since moved teams and now it is just me (for the time being).
So I was considering moving back to Visual Studio or even switching to Visual Studio Code, but I wanted to see some arguments against this.
Here is my list so far, but it’s probably out of date since I haven’t used Visual Studio in a long time.
Pros of Rider:
- Much faster than using ReSharper
- Less sharp interface with a better font
- I’m used to it at this point
- I have a Nyan cat loading bar which is kind of fun
Cons of Rider:
- Enterprise license is expensive (probably)
- New versions of C# aren’t immediately supported
- Refactorings are becoming less necessary with the rise of AI assistants
- Don’t really like their source control manager
Wanted to hear what other users think. What keeps you using Rider?
I could be wrong here, but I’m pretty sure the individual licenses for jetbrains products (the ide’s at least) can be used for commercial purposes.
It’s just that the license is tied to you as a person and not a general “seat” license for the company. You also can’t pay for it with company funds directly.
On the VS side the community edition is free for commercial use provided there are less than 250 pc’s (doesn’t specify what a pc is exactly but i shouldn’t think it’s a worry for you) and the company makes less than $1 million dollars.
To see if the community edition does what you need to can check the official comparison chart : https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/compare/
IIRC Rider is all the same version regardless of license type.