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Microsoft Visual Studio vs SharePoint Designer comparison

Microsoft Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer are both solutions in the .NET Development Services category. Microsoft Visual Studio is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.5, while SharePoint Designer is ranked #2 with an average rating of 7.9. Microsoft Visual Studio holds a 15.9% mindshare in NDS, compared to SharePoint Designer’s 13.0% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Microsoft Visual Studio users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 82% of SharePoint Designer users who would recommend it.
Microsoft Visual Studio
Read 79 Microsoft Visual Studio reviews
  • 663 Views
  • 196 Comparison Views
95% willing to recommend
SharePoint Designer
Read 49 SharePoint Designer reviews
  • 544 Views
  • 162 Comparison Views
82% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary
We performed a comparison between Microsoft Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two .NET Development Services solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

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To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Visual Studio vs. SharePoint Designer Report (Updated: March 2025).
Buyer's Guide
Microsoft Visual Studio vs. SharePoint Designer
March 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

Microsoft Visual Studio
Ranking in .NET Development Services
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SharePoint Designer
Ranking in .NET Development Services
2nd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the .NET Development Services category, the mindshare of Microsoft Visual Studio is 15.9%, down from 23.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SharePoint Designer is 13.0%, down from 18.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
.NET Development Services
 

Featured Reviews

LorenzoMoore - PeerSpot reviewer
Beneficial user interface, flexible, and good support
Microsoft Visual Studio is scalable. We have an assistant director and software development using Microsoft Visual Studio in my department. In the whole company, there could be hundreds using Microsoft Visual Studio. In my department, they do not like Microsoft Visual Studio, but across the departments, we will increase the usage of Microsoft Visual Studio.
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Vivek Vaibhav - PeerSpot reviewer
Intuitive, customizable, and reliable
Exporting the whole SharePoint website is an issue. For example, let's say I want to deploy it in the client environment. Right now, this was based on our own company's environment and if I wanted to deploy that onto the client's environment. To do this, I will have to recreate everything from scratch, which takes a lot of time. There should be a way somewhere where I can download the custom designs I have made and upload them to the client servers so that we can configure them on their servers. Secondly, when you have uploaded data, for example, from an Excel spreadsheet, you download it in the form of a dot IQY file. This IQY file is a bit tough to work with as it's a server-side file. If there was any option where you could just download the flat files and work with them, that would have been great.
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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of Microsoft Visual Studio are the database connections."
"I like that it works fine and that it performs better than competing products. I'm very happy with Microsoft Visual Studio."
"While you're coding, it's really nice to be able to print stuff out and make sure that all the data is being organized the way you want it to be."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft Visual Studio are the way we are able to design code, deploy, and test our application. It is easy to move an artifact from the start to the deployment stage. It has well-defined processes that you can integrate with any team. Additionally, the solution is always improving."
"You can easily create, edit, and test any software and develop applications for all the major platforms, including cloud, desktop, and mobile."
"What we like about Microsoft Visual Studio is that it's a comprehensive tool. It has features that work for different plans and it has a wide variety of use cases. It's also a powerful tool and it's quite efficient."
"The most valuable features are the extensions."
"The installation of the solution is easy."
More Microsoft Visual Studio pros
"One of the most valuable features is that it's free. If you have SharePoint and you want to do some branding, then the only tool available is SharePoint Designer. Microsoft gives the portal, the content management system, and, on top of that, it gives you Designer. So we don't have a choice, but Designer is good."
"Retrieving documents and uploading them is easy."
"The solution tightly integrates with all other collaboration tools."
"I find the document management and search of SharePoint the most valuable features."
"SharePoint has very good features for collaboration."
"When you have a group project and you want to share your document with your group members, the solution is very useful."
"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."
"It helps centralize and store files."
More SharePoint Designer pros
 

Cons

"Microsoft Visual Studio needs to improve integration."
"We'd like the solution to be more secure."
"There's not much help to deal with issues on Microsoft's official websites."
"It is simple to use for most developers and nearly impossible to use for non-developers."
"The interface is slow to start up."
"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."
"The tool's interface should be more user-friendly."
"I would like to see Visual Studio improve reporting to give us more details on failures. When there are failures, it's difficult to debug. It would be helpful to have more error information to help us to identify the issue and resolve it. I want to know more about software failures and exceptions in the system."
More Microsoft Visual Studio cons
"The pain point of SharePoint Designer is sometimes it gives you issues that can be resolved mostly by clearing the cache, but Microsoft should still work on it and make the product more stable. Another issue related to SharePoint Designer is that with the newer SharePoint versions, Microsoft hasn't released a newer version of SharePoint Designer. Instead, Microsoft is recommending that you use the same old SharePoint Designer 2013. If Microsoft updates SharePoint Designer, the product will be more beneficial."
"I am not sure how stable the solution will be once Microsoft stops supporting it."
"If they included some training modules, I would give them a ten, because that would make it even more user-friendly."
"In the solution, if you have a case of accidental deletion, there's no restoration, which should have been there."
"The designer itself could be improved, as it isn't particularly intuitive."
"This solution could definitely be made easier to use."
"SharePoint Designer needs filter options for lists and libraries."
"I would like to see SharePoint improve the integration with different systems. I also would like to see more customization."
More SharePoint Designer cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The development license for Microsoft Visual Studio is free. I don't know if there's a licensing cost to it."
"We have an enterprise-level license. The cost is expensive for small to medium-sized organizations."
"We purchased an expensive enterprise version of Microsoft Visual Studio."
"The license is taken care of by my company and the price could be less expensive."
"I use Microsoft Visual Studio's free version."
"Our purchasing department pays a fair price for it."
"I am working with the open-source community version, which is free."
"I am using the free version of Microsoft Visual Studio."
More Microsoft Visual Studio pricing and cost advice
"Most of the time, our customer's license from Microsoft includes the cost of SharePoint. However, if you have to buy it then SharePoint is quite expensive."
"It is a free solution that does not require a license."
"SharePoint Designer is a free product. It's SharePoint that needs a license, not SharePoint Designer."
"We are using an enterprise SharePoint Designer license."
"SharePoint Designer's pricing is okay."
"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"I've never paid for SharePoint Designer. What I paid for, is the SharePoint license, the cava, and then the client accesses the line fee."
"I use Macintosh devices, and because this solution is not available in the Apple Ecosystem I use it because it is cost-effective."
More SharePoint Designer pricing and cost advice
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Educational Organization
7%
Government
18%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Microsoft Visual Studio?
We can use different .NET features.
See all answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Visual Studio?
Microsoft Visual Studio is a free product.
See all answers
What needs improvement with Microsoft Visual Studio?
We have different platforms available for web development. The solution must provide user-friendly features. We get updates frequently. Multiple versions are released within a short period. We need...
See all answers
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!
See all answers
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.
See all answers
 

Comparisons

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Microsoft Visual Studio
March 2025
Microsoft Visual Studio reportDownload Microsoft Visual Studio product report
Buyer's Guide
SharePoint Designer
March 2025
SharePoint Designer reportDownload SharePoint Designer product report
 

Also Known As

MS Visual Studio
No data available
 

Overview

Visual Studio.NET is the umbrella that represents the key pieces of the .NET platform delivered from Microsoft, including the .NET Framework, the recently announced .NET Core, and a shared common layer of packages, compilers and runtime. Read this .NET blog post about the evolution of the platform and the different pieces that make .NET 2015.
Microsoft
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
 

Sample Customers

Knab, Hamburg Port Authority, Kecioren Municipality, National Instruments, Hamburg Port Authority, Government of Odisha, Kongsberg Maritime AS
Pyrotek Inc., ICA, Deliver Australia, Secretary of Economy of Mexico, Aegon, ABB Switzerland, Ascent Yarns Private Limited, Bakewell Biscuits Pvt Ltd, Hitachi Consulting
Buyer's Guide
Microsoft Visual Studio vs. SharePoint Designer
March 2025
Free Report: Microsoft Visual Studio vs. SharePoint Designer
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Visual Studio vs. SharePoint Designer and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
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