No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

ASP.NET vs Microsoft Visual Studio comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

ASP.NET
Ranking in .NET Development Services
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Visual Studio
Ranking in .NET Development Services
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the .NET Development Services category, the mindshare of ASP.NET is 12.7%, up from 12.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Visual Studio is 17.1%, up from 15.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
.NET Development Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Visual Studio17.1%
ASP.NET12.7%
Other70.2%
.NET Development Services
 

Featured Reviews

SasidharParupudi - PeerSpot reviewer
Principle Consultant at a outsourcing company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Building reliable web APIs and sites has become faster and development stays well supported
I think Microsoft can make ASP.NET better by catching up with other frameworks by adopting features that are very popular in those frameworks, such as minimal APIs and other innovations. They have introduced Blazor, which is their newer front-end development software framework, but unfortunately, Blazor is not well adopted in the market. However, I feel that they will catch up in the future as Blazor has a lot of potential. In my opinion, there is not anything extra needed immediately for ASP.NET; the framework is self-sufficient and very mature at this stage. The problem lies with wider adoption, as some people are anti-Microsoft and prefer open-source alternatives such as React. Microsoft could potentially do a better job at marketing these solutions, but other than that, the tool has the potential to be used in any enterprise-level applications. I would say the setup process for ASP.NET is relatively simple, but with the latest generation of user management or integration with OpenID, the documentation is not comprehensive in terms of what you can do with the latest libraries. They support many things and have decoupled themselves from their own identity servers, but still need to improve documentation considerably.
PR
Senior Manager, Application Development at PSKW, LLC
Code reviews have become clearer and debugging now improves multi-language API development
I appreciate the debugging capability of Microsoft Visual Studio the most. The tracing of the debugging is what I value. I can use any editor to write the code, but Microsoft Visual Studio has strong capability. Microsoft Visual Studio has good integration with the plugins I want to use, the different types of plugins available for different languages and even JSON. Microsoft Visual Studio has improved significantly. Before, people used to use Notepad and other basic editors. Using the studio gave them the capability to properly debug and find issues. Additionally, it provides good code organization and indentation, as well as color coding for comments. It is very useful, as it gives function descriptions and class descriptions. It is very easy for someone who is not writing the code to understand it when they look at it, as it is very descriptive with proper commenting. I cannot give exact statistics on time saved, but I can provide statistics on quality improvement. The coding standard has been enforced. It has tremendously improved with Microsoft Visual Studio. I would say anywhere between 20 to 50% improvement, depending on which team we are discussing.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I started my career with ASP.NET and I like most of the things about it."
"The most valuable feature of ASP.NET is the support of multiple platforms with ASP.NET Core. Additionally, Azure integrates well with ASP.NET and Visual Studio."
"The most valuable features are ease of use, scalability, and flexibility."
"The solution is easy to integrate and understand. It has a very good user interface and a lot of prebuilt tools, which require a lot less coding if we compare it to other solutions."
"Rapid Development Easy to learn Wide range third party controls availability"
"It is seamless compared to Java or any other technology stack."
"It is completely, positively, and positively assisting us."
"This framework is very easy to use and tweak for our business needs."
"The solution includes a debug function that I can breakpoint to easily detect what is wrong with my applications."
"Microsoft Visual Studio helps my company improve efficiency in software development suites."
"The system can efficiently manage the databases."
"It is easy to integrate with GitHub; Visual Studio is very much UI-based and simple, so it's very easy to integrate GitHub with Visual Studio and it is much easier than Eclipse."
"I was testing how to publish in a cloud using Azure and it was very easy."
"Microsoft Visual Studio is highly stable."
"It is a stable solution."
"We have no issues with scaling."
 

Cons

"Not best for SEO out of the box."
"One last thing that needs to be improved is the Azure developer experience, the AZD commands, and how to deploy Aspire applications using different methods, especially on Kubernetes."
"The solution's initial setup is intermediate, and it could be improved."
"Improving the project ready templates will add a great amount of value."
"Sometimes it can be really difficult to debug using ASP.NET. When there's an issue, trying to find out the cause is not always easy, so debugging is the top area for improvement, in my opinion."
"They have introduced Blazor, which is their newer front-end development software framework, but unfortunately, Blazor is not well adopted in the market."
"The capability related to Python needs to be improved."
"In my opinion, this solution should improve their web toolkit."
"What I don't like about Microsoft Visual Studio is its user interface. It could be better."
"The interface could be more user friendly."
"Additional components such as add-ons could be included in the installation packages because it saves time for the user during installation."
"The time that it takes to load the application can be reduced"
"It would be nice if Visual Studio's extensions and updates could self-correct, if they are not working or disabled, and also inform the user."
"Support for spell checking comments should be inbuilt and automatically installed."
"Technical support needs to be improved. Right now, it's not great."
"The reporting services are quite limited in terms of features and need to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"ASP.NET is not an expensive solution."
"On a scale from one to ten, with one being cost efficient and 10 being the most expensive, I would rate ASP.NET's pricing at six. There used to be IAF, which you could spin on a Windows machine. However, that sort of setup does not exist for Linux machines. Because customers still prefer a Windows underlying infrastructure, it can get expensive."
"ASP.NET is open-source and free of charge."
"The pricing is somewhere in the middle. Not too expensive, but not the cheapest either."
"I think ASP.NET, in deployment, is something that's quite costly when you're on a cloud provider such as Azure, and you have to pay the server cost. On average, it can cost approximately $1,000 per month to host a good site with a few databases."
"This is a free solution. However, we have some server licensing costs which are not directly a cost of using the solution."
"The solution requires a licensing fee but is worth the investment."
"ASP.NET is an open-source solution."
"The development license for Microsoft Visual Studio is free. I don't know if there's a licensing cost to it."
"The price is good."
"Microsoft Visual Studio is a free product."
"The solution is a free tool."
"We use the free version, and you don't need a license."
"The price of Microsoft Visual Studio is approximately $400 annually."
"Microsoft Visual Studio is not expensive. Its licensing costs are expensive."
"We have an enterprise-level license. The cost is expensive for small to medium-sized organizations."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which .NET Development Services solutions are best for your needs.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
16%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Performing Arts
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
17%
Construction Company
11%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business36
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise53
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ASP.NET?
Our solution is deployed in a hybrid setup; we have some on-site on a private cloud and some on Azure. Most of our costing comes from database licensing, as we use SQL Server, which has very costly...
What needs improvement with ASP.NET?
With the Aspire project, the community is working well on third-party tools for integration, but as a framework, it is solid for almost all normal use cases. For some advanced use cases, I do not s...
What is your primary use case for ASP.NET?
I am mainly developing backend solutions, microservices, and monolithic web backends with ASP.NET.I tried Angular and Blazor; I worked with Angular a long time ago, but I worked with a small projec...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Visual Studio?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that since we install it directly from downloads, the cost is minimal. If we have a Microsoft Visual Studio enterprise license, I'm not sure...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Visual Studio?
Microsoft Visual Studio has done enough from my perspective. I am not a core developer, so I just use the basic tools that I need for basic things. A core developer would easily see additional thin...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Visual Studio?
I use Microsoft Visual Studio to automate some processes within the establishment.
 

Also Known As

No data available
MS Visual Studio
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Kienzle Automotive GmbH, Sumitomo Rubber Industries, Vengo Labs, Oneview Healthcare, BookedOut, Ministry of Rural Development, Grupo WRR
Knab, Hamburg Port Authority, Kecioren Municipality, National Instruments, Hamburg Port Authority, Government of Odisha, Kongsberg Maritime AS
Find out what your peers are saying about ASP.NET vs. Microsoft Visual Studio and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.