Visual Studio 2022

Community is free for individual developers, open-source contributors, academic research and classroom use, and for small teams of up to five developers inside enterprises whose annual revenue is below US$1 million. The moment a larger company uses it for commercial development, or a sixth developer inside a small company starts using it, you must move every developer to Professional or Enterprise. Read the Community EULA carefully before standardising on it — many organisations assume 'free' means unrestricted and are surprised by the revenue and headcount thresholds at audit time. Community is feature-rich and a perfectly fine IDE; the only reason to avoid it is licence compliance.

Professional gives you the full IDE, CodeLens basic, the integrated debugger and profilers, and the Professional subscription benefits (Azure DevOps Basic for five users, a US$50/month Azure credit on subscriptions, and a library of e-learning resources). Enterprise adds IntelliTrace and historical debugging, Live Unit Testing across the whole solution, Architecture and dependency diagrams, the advanced CPU / memory profilers, Microsoft Fakes for unit-test isolation, the load test functionality, code clone analysis, and far higher Azure credits (US$150/month). For most teams, the deciding factor is IntelliTrace and Live Unit Testing — if you regularly debug intermittent production issues or do test-driven development at scale, Enterprise pays for itself.

Subscriptions (annual or monthly) include benefits that perpetual licences do not — Azure credits for development and test workloads, training entitlements on Pluralsight or LinkedIn Learning depending on tier, software for development and test (the old MSDN benefit, now Visual Studio Dev Essentials extended), and GitHub Enterprise included with Enterprise subscriptions at certain volumes. Perpetual licences purchased through Volume Licensing entitle you only to the IDE itself, plus version-upgrade rights if you also bought Software Assurance. For most teams the subscription is a better deal: the Azure credit alone covers a lot of dev / test infrastructure, and the GitHub Enterprise inclusion is increasingly the deciding factor.

GitHub Copilot is a separate per-user subscription that integrates into Visual Studio 2022 for code completion, chat-based code generation, test scaffolding and refactor suggestions. Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers receive Copilot Business as part of their Visual Studio Enterprise subscription at certain GitHub Enterprise tiers — check your specific entitlements with your reseller. The IntelliCode features that ship in the box (whole-line completions trained on your codebase) are free and require no Copilot subscription.

Visual Studio Code is free, open-source under the MIT licence (with Microsoft's downloaded builds carrying a permissive but proprietary telemetry-enabled EULA) and unrestricted commercially. It is a different product — a lighter editor without the full Visual Studio IDE features (live debugging across multi-project solutions, integrated profilers, designer tools for WinForms / WPF / XAML, the test orchestrator, IntelliTrace, the rich C++ tooling for game and embedded development). Pick whichever fits the workload; many .NET teams use VS Code for everyday editing and the full Visual Studio for debugging, profiling and designer work.

Visual Studio for Mac was retired in August 2024. The supported path for Mac-based .NET development is now Visual Studio Code with the C# Dev Kit extension. For cross-platform mobile (formerly Xamarin), .NET MAUI is the current toolkit and is fully supported in Visual Studio 2022 on Windows. iOS development still requires a Mac at build time, but the editing and most of the debug loop can stay in Visual Studio 2022 with pair-to-Mac.

Through Volume Licensing, Visual Studio is sold per user as either a perpetual licence with optional Software Assurance, or as a subscription (cloud or standard). The subscription bundles what used to be called MSDN: rights to install Windows Server, SQL Server, Office and other Microsoft software in dev / test environments at no additional licence cost, as long as those installs are used exclusively for development and test purposes and the developer has an active subscription. This benefit alone is often the practical reason large engineering organisations standardise on Visual Studio subscriptions across the team.