Laravel Homestead vs Visual Studio: What are the differences?
What is Laravel Homestead? The official Laravel local development environment (Vagrant box). Laravel Homestead is an official, pre-packaged Vagrant "box" that provides you a wonderful development environment without requiring you to install PHP, HHVM, a web server, and any other server software on your local machine. Homestead runs on any Windows, Mac, or Linux system, and includes the Nginx web server, PHP 5.6, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, and all of the other goodies you need to develop amazing Laravel applications.
What is Visual Studio? State-of-the-art tools and services that you can use to create great apps for devices, the cloud, and everything in between. Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications.
Laravel Homestead belongs to "Virtual Machine" category of the tech stack, while Visual Studio can be primarily classified under "Integrated Development Environment".
"Easy to setup" is the primary reason why developers consider Laravel Homestead over the competitors, whereas "Intellisense, ui" was stated as the key factor in picking Visual Studio.
Laravel Homestead is an open source tool with 3.14K GitHub stars and 1.32K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Laravel Homestead's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Visual Studio has a broader approval, being mentioned in 676 company stacks & 1010 developers stacks; compared to Laravel Homestead, which is listed in 21 company stacks and 24 developer stacks.