SharePoint Designer vs Zend Studio comparison

Microsoft and Zend are both solutions in the .NET Development Services category. Microsoft is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.7, while Zend is ranked #8. Microsoft holds a 8.6% mindshare in NDS, compared to Zend’s 3.4% mindshare. Additionally, 82% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Zend users who would recommend it.

SharePoint Designer

Read 49 SharePoint Designer reviews

477 Views
120 Comparison Views

82% willing to recommend

Zend Studio

Read 1 Zend Studio review

117 Views
23 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

SharePoint Designer

Zend Studio

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between SharePoint Designer and Zend Studio based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Adobe, FourJs and others in .NET Development Services.

To learn more, read our detailed .NET Development Services Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

.NET Development Services

June 2025

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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

SharePoint Designer

Ranking in .NET Development Services

2nd

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Zend Studio

Ranking in .NET Development Services

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the .NET Development Services category, the mindshare of SharePoint Designer is 8.6%, down from 19.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zend Studio is 3.4%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

.NET Development Services

Featured Reviews

Raphael Haroun Ikyagh

Network Administrator at Letshego

Offers ability to directly share documents and highly stable

It's been stable for me. I haven't encountered any issues with the sites I've developed locally within the organization as long as the license remains valid. It's very stable. I haven't had any issues with outages or needing to republish content. It's always accessible to authorized users, so it's stable. The stability is almost a ten out of ten for me.

Read full review

marketacumen

President at Market Acumen, Inc.

It has higher quality code, faster debugging, and higher quality projects

* Stability is sometimes lacking in updates. * Search/replace across multiple files is not ideal. * The debugger often has problems determining where to map files to local projects, as well as setting breakpoints, which often are ignored depending on your configuration. * The product requires a subscription to Zend Server Developer, which used to be free and now has an annual fee, but it is still worth the money.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We used SharePoint Designer 2013 widely for data mining, exploring the content, and editing. Those are the main features that you would need to use SharePoint Designer for."

"I am a developer, and whatever is not possible with the SharePoint default feature, we make custom features available for our clients. Anything which is not possible using all the methods within the solution we can customize."

"The most valuable features of SharePoint Designer are integration and collaboration capabilities, such as allowing more than one person to edit a file."

"The basic functionality the solution makes it easy to share documents or information with the team."

"The solution tightly integrates with all other collaboration tools."

"We appreciate the fact that this solution can provide us with an on-premises version, as due to our geographical location, we are not able to use cloud-based tools."

"The solution is scalable."

"The drag and drop feature is the most useful feature when using this solution."

More SharePoint Designer pros

"It has the ability to jump to any file in your project with a few keystrokes, as well as the ability to command-click on any token in your code and have it jump to the token's definition."

"It has higher quality code, faster debugging, and higher quality projects."

Cons

"The system can become slow which should be improved."

"Microsoft could include more applications in this. And if more applications are included, then it can be scalable that way."

"Further development for SharePoint online would be ideal. However, I'm not sure if it's true that Microsoft will no longer develop SharePoint Designer in the future or not."

"I would like to be able to use SharePoint Designer without having to buy other third party programs."

"The record management and digital signature sides need improvement because we still need to rely on other third-party tools."

"SharePoint Designer needs filter options for lists and libraries."

"SharePoint is too complex to install and maintain."

"This solution could definitely be made easier to use."

More SharePoint Designer cons

"The debugger often has problems determining where to map files to local projects."

"Stability is sometimes lacking in updates."

"Most recent set of patches (2018) on Mac OS X caused the app to crash when you would cut more than 10 lines of code. Apparently, this was due to a bug in Eclipse, but regardless, it took several months for Zend to post a patch."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using an enterprise SharePoint Designer license."

"The tool is free of cost."

"Priced per user per month with different plans to choose from."

"The tool's pricing is cheap."

"There is no licensing cost for Designer—it's free."

"The price is reasonable."

"It is a free solution that does not require a license."

"This solution is free of charge."

More SharePoint Designer pricing and cost advice

"The product requires a subscription to Zend Server Developer, which used to be free and now has an annual fee, but it is still worth the money."

"Licensing is reasonable for this type of tool. Although, you can cobble together a solution which is zero cost."

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860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Government

13%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about SharePoint Designer?

It saved me big time once! My car got broken into and they took my laptop with all my files. But I didn't have to worry because everything was backed up on SharePoint. It was a lifesaver!

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SharePoint Designer?

I've leased Microsoft SharePoint Designer for the enterprise, not System Center. It's for private work, web development specifically.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SharePoint Designer?

For me, it's flexible enough for most things. But maybe they could improve the user interface to make it easier for everyone to navigate and use. That would be a big plus.

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Comparisons

Microsoft Visual Studio vs SharePoint Designer

Compared 100% of the time

More SharePoint Designer Competitors

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SharePoint Designer

June 2025

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Buyer's Guide

.NET Development Services

June 2025

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Overview

SharePoint Designer is the tool of choice for the rapid development of SharePoint applications. Using SharePoint Designer, advanced users and developers alike can rapidly create SharePoint solutions in response to business needs. Advanced users can compose no-code solutions that encompass a variety of common scenarios, from collaborative sites and web publishing to Line-Of-Business data integration, business intelligence solutions, and human workflows, leveraging the building blocks available in SharePoint in an easy to use environment.

Microsoft

Zend Studio â the PHP IDE for smarter development. It codes faster with up to 3X performance improvements in indexing, validation, searching of PHP code. It has superior PHP 7.1 support, PHP 7.1 express migration assistant, and seamless integration with Zend Server 9. It provides robust debugging capabilities with Xdebug, Zend Debugger, and Z-Ray integration. Zend Studio has an extensive plugin capabilities provided by the large Eclipse eco-system and supports for best-in-class dev tools including Docker and Git Flow Intelligent code editor. Deploy PHP applications on any server including cloud support for Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure and support for HiDPi displays - scale graphics (ala 4K resolution).

Zend

Sample Customers

Pyrotek Inc., ICA, Deliver Australia, Secretary of Economy of Mexico, Aegon, ABB Switzerland, Ascent Yarns Private Limited, Bakewell Biscuits Pvt Ltd, Hitachi Consulting

CDS Global, EnglishCentral, BNP Paribas, Carlo Gavazzi, Sunstate Equipment, Novadex GmbH, CONFTEC, Marilan, Mediaspike, Cisco WebEx, Corvette America, Value Drug Mart Associates Ltd., Allied Beverage Group

Buyer's Guide

.NET Development Services

June 2025

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