Visual Studio Code vs WebStorm

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Visual Studio Code

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Visual Studio Code vs WebStorm: What are the differences?

Visual Studio Code is a lightweight yet powerful code editor developed by Microsoft, while WebStorm is a feature-rich IDE developed by JetBrains. Let's explore the key differences between them.

  1. Integrated Development Environment (IDE): Visual Studio Code is a lightweight code editor with a strong focus on customization and extensibility, making it suitable for various programming languages and frameworks. On the other hand, WebStorm is a powerful and feature-rich IDE specifically designed for web development, providing extensive support for JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

  2. Ecosystem and Extensions: Visual Studio Code has a thriving ecosystem with a wide range of extensions available that can enhance its functionality. It supports a variety of languages and frameworks, making it highly versatile. In contrast, WebStorm has a more focused approach with built-in support for web technologies and frameworks like Angular and React. It provides a comprehensive set of features and tools specifically tailored for web development.

  3. IntelliSense and Code Navigation: Visual Studio Code offers intelligent code completion and suggestions, with support for multiple languages and extensive customization options. It also provides advanced code navigation features, such as Go to Definition and Find All References. WebStorm, on the other hand, offers powerful code analysis and static type checking, allowing developers to catch potential errors and navigate through their codebase efficiently.

  4. Debugging and Testing: Visual Studio Code provides a seamless debugging experience with support for breakpoints, watch expressions, and integrated debugging tools for various programming languages. It also has built-in support for testing frameworks and provides easy integration with popular testing tools. WebStorm offers a similar debugging experience with advanced debugging capabilities, including conditional breakpoints, step-through debugging, and remote debugging. It also includes built-in support for testing frameworks and provides tools for running tests.

  5. Version Control Integration: Visual Studio Code integrates well with version control systems like Git, providing features such as side-by-side diff views, branch management, and blame annotations. It also includes built-in Git commands and supports popular Git extensions. WebStorm offers seamless integration with Git as well, with features like a visual Git tool, branch management, and support for common Git operations.

  6. Collaboration and Live Share: Visual Studio Code allows developers to collaborate in real-time using its Live Share extension, enabling multiple users to edit and debug code together. It provides a collaborative editing experience with features like shared server connections, shared terminals, and shared debugging. WebStorm also supports collaboration through its Code With Me feature, allowing developers to work together in real-time and share an IDE session.

In summary, Visual Studio Code is a versatile and lightweight code editor with extensive customization options and a wide ecosystem of extensions, while WebStorm is a feature-rich IDE specifically designed for web development, providing comprehensive support for web technologies and frameworks.

Advice on Visual Studio Code and WebStorm
Johnny Bell

When I switched to Visual Studio Code 12 months ago from PhpStorm I was in love, it was great. However after using VS Code for a year, I see myself switching back and forth between WebStorm and VS Code. The VS Code plugins are great however I notice Prettier, auto importing of components and linking to the definitions often break, and I have to restart VS Code multiple times a week and sometimes a day.

We use Ruby here so I do like that Visual Studio Code highlights that for me out of the box, with WebStorm I'd need to probably also install RubyMine and have 2 IDE's going at the same time.

Should I stick with Visual Studio Code, or switch to something else? #help

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Replies (15)
Erik Ostrom
Recommends
on
RubyMineRubyMine

If you're working with both Ruby and JavaScript, buy RubyMine and shut down the other two. It's much better for Ruby than Visual Studio Code is. It can also do everything WebStorm does, if you install the plugins you need from JetBrains, and they all work together nicely.

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Marc Swikull
Recommends
on
RubyMineRubyMine

If you install RubyMine, you shouldn't need WebStorm, as all the functionality of WebStorm appears to be included in RubyMine. (See here: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/132950).

I've used PhpStorm for several years and have never needed to open (or even download) WebStorm for anything front-end or JavaScript related.

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Russel Werner
Lead Engineer at StackShare · | 6 upvotes · 259K views
Recommends
on
WebStormWebStorm
at

I work at the same company as you and I use WebStorm for 99% of my tasks. I also have RubyMine installed and use that when I have to tweak some backend code. I tried using RubyMine for JavaScript but was unhappy with how it felt and I believe that WebStorm is faster because it has less plugins and language extensions running. Summary: Buy and use WebStorm for primary development and keep VS Code around for when you have to touch Ruby.

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Danny Battison
Recommends
on
PhpStormPhpStorm

JetBrains all the way - my entire team uses PhpStorm and none of us would even consider switching.

The availability of IDEs for other languages along with consistency in environment and keyboard shortcuts is also a godsend, which is the reason I'd also choose Rider over Visual Studio (but also VS for Mac is trash, but I digress...)

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Recommends
on
Visual Studio CodeVisual Studio Code

I've never had much issue running multiple IDEs and generally pick them based on the languages they best support. For front end work where I mainly use TypeScript, I stick heavily with Visual Studio Code. However, for backend work which we do primarily in Python, PyCharm is my go-to editor. The one thing that I do however is I do remap keyboard shortcuts so I get consistent keyboard ability even when I switch IDEs.

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Recommends
on
PhpStormPhpStorm

So here is the deal man, bottom line you want to write code. All of these tools are built in a mouse-driven world, they are designed not for engineers, but office monkeys. If you want a real workflow that gives you ultimate performance, customization and speed you need to use a modal editor, I suggest NeoVim. Start using it 20% of the time on single file edits, watch youtube videos about it and teach yourself vim gestures. It will infuriate you for 6 weeks, make you cry for another 2 months. But as you use it more, as long as your usage goes over 40% of the time, in 6 months you will understand why most of the world's too engineers use it. Settling on lesser editors out of laziness is exactly the attitude that results in shitty the engineering. Yeah it's hard. You're smart. You do hard things. Once it isn't hard anymore you will blow yourself away at how much more efficiently you edit files.

Also vim keybindings in a mouse driven editor does not cut it. Managing files, buffers and workflow is half of the value of vim/neovim. It is OK if you have to use an IDE (currently I only use an IDE for java development, so I have little choice)

So use VSCode while you teach yourself vim.

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Recommends
on
Visual Studio CodeVisual Studio Code

If I have to choose one I would go with VS Code; it’s become pretty mature and keeps getting better. If those plugins are creating problems for you then just uninstall them, find an alternative, or make a PR to fix. But at the end of the day these are IDE’s and they are meant to save you time. I would go with whatever helps you develop code faster. If restarting VS code slows you down then make a switch, that personally would annoying the crap out of me. Else maybe it’s a quick restart, not the end of the word, hopefully someone will fix at some point.

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Recommends
on
Visual Studio CodeVisual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a text editor. And this is best option in my opinion. For Ruby, I cannot say how VS Code is good. If you wanna choose IDE, RubyMine should fit your needs. Because IDEs are more compatible with major needs. But text editors are just text editor. You can do same things with also text editors. I recommend to try both VS Code and RubyMine. And you will be able to find which fits better for your needs

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Recommends
at

Visiual Studio is the best

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Recommends
on
Visual Studio CodeVisual Studio Code

If you find something that works and are comfortable with it, stay with it. Changing IDE's and learning their idiosyncrasies takes valuable time away from programming while learning setups and keyboard short cuts. I personally use VS Code for cost and decent multiple language support. I've had issues occasionally with it locking up, but it is under heavy development and continually improving. I have also found it more intuitive for new programmers. ** Having profiles for different languages can reduce the amount of plugins running and issues they can cause.

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Kyle Schoonover
Senior Software Engineer at Nordstrom · | 2 upvotes · 221.7K views
Recommends
on
Visual Studio CodeVisual Studio Code

I'm personally a Visual Studio Code fan. I've used it for both Go and Java. It really depends on the quality and support of the plugins. Typically VS Code doesn't crash as much as a bad plugin causes an unforeseen error. Make sure you stay up to date and look at alternative plugins.

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Recommends
on
PhpStormPhpStorm

I usually have both running but do the bulk of my language work in the appropriate JetBrains flavor. One thing to watch out for in VS is that under the hood it is running the tools needed for whatever language you are working with. This is where tools like JetBrains shine. While I am sure you can tune the heck out of what you use in VS, the provides context and clarity...

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Lungu Alexandru-Mihai
Recommends
on
VimVim

Well you can try for a while MacVim because it is already configured with tons of plugins. My favourite text editors are Sublime Text and TextMate which are lightweight and speedy. My feeling is that JetBrains IDEs are making you brainless.

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Recommends
on
Visual Studio CodeVisual Studio Code

Are you using the prettier-vscode VSCode extension or prettier via prettier-eslint? The prettier-vscode extension recommends you...

Use prettier-eslint instead of prettier. Other settings will only be fallbacks in case they could not be inferred from ESLint rules.

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Recommends

An integrated development environment software with huge potential in the future is VS Code. So I would personally say you can use VS code.

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Decisions about Visual Studio Code and WebStorm
Samriddhi Sinha
Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling · | 6 upvotes · 964.6K views

Lightweight and versatile. Huge library of extensions that enable you to integrate a host of services to your development environment. VS Code's biggest strength is its library of extensions which enables it to directly compete with every single major IDE for almost all major programming languages.

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Despite its resource consumption behaviour I have fallen in love with WebStorm, its the best when come to write Javascript application, analyse code have never been this easy.

To mention few here are the features:

  1. Intelligent coding assistance
  2. Debugging, tracing and testing
  3. Local history
  4. Version Control Systems etc
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Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 12 upvotes · 1.3M views

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

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It's important for our developers to be able to use a common IDE so that we can easily share plugins and configuration which relate to our stack and setup. Webstorm may be slightly better for Javascript development out of the box but VS Code is free and as such more developers are used to using it. This means that new team members are able to get up and running quicker.

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Simon Ibssa
Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo · | 2 upvotes · 1.2M views

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

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Russel Werner
Lead Engineer at StackShare · | 0 upvote · 26.3K views

I chose WebStorm because its a mature and stable production that has every feature I could ask for in an IDE. It saves me time and catches mistakes. All my normal development tasks, including amazing VCS integration, can be done quickly from a single place. They continue to make updates and integrate popular tools and frameworks.

Some people might complain that WebStorm costs money, however it is a relatively cheap piece of software for the number of hours you use it. Definitely worth it!

All of JetBrains other products are equally as awesome and provide a common interface. I also use Goland, RubyMine, and CLion. I used PHPStorm for 7 years and loved it.

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Pros of Visual Studio Code
Pros of WebStorm
  • 339
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 308
    Fast
  • 193
    Front-end develop out of the box
  • 158
    Support TypeScript IntelliSense
  • 142
    Very basic but free
  • 126
    Git integration
  • 106
    Intellisense
  • 78
    Faster than Atom
  • 53
    Better ui, easy plugins, and nice git integration
  • 45
    Great Refactoring Tools
  • 44
    Good Plugins
  • 42
    Terminal
  • 38
    Superb markdown support
  • 36
    Open Source
  • 34
    Extensions
  • 26
    Large & up-to-date extension community
  • 26
    Awesome UI
  • 24
    Powerful and fast
  • 22
    Portable
  • 18
    Best editor
  • 18
    Best code editor
  • 17
    Easy to get started with
  • 15
    Lots of extensions
  • 15
    Built on Electron
  • 15
    Crossplatform
  • 15
    Good for begginers
  • 14
    Extensions for everything
  • 14
    Open, cross-platform, fast, monthly updates
  • 14
    All Languages Support
  • 13
    Easy to use and learn
  • 12
    Extensible
  • 12
    "fast, stable & easy to use"
  • 11
    Totally customizable
  • 11
    Git out of the box
  • 11
    Faster edit for slow computer
  • 11
    Ui design is great
  • 11
    Useful for begginer
  • 10
    Great community
  • 10
    SSH support
  • 10
    Fast Startup
  • 9
    It has terminal and there are lots of shortcuts in it
  • 9
    Powerful Debugger
  • 9
    Great language support
  • 9
    Works With Almost EveryThing You Need
  • 8
    Python extension is fast
  • 8
    Can compile and run .py files
  • 7
    Great document formater
  • 7
    Features rich
  • 6
    He is not Michael
  • 6
    Awesome multi cursor support
  • 6
    Extension Echosystem
  • 6
    She is not Rachel
  • 5
    Language server client
  • 5
    Easy azure
  • 5
    SFTP Workspace
  • 5
    VSCode.pro Course makes it easy to learn
  • 5
    Very proffesional
  • 4
    Supports lots of operating systems
  • 4
    Has better support and more extentions for debugging
  • 4
    Excellent as git difftool and mergetool
  • 4
    Virtualenv integration
  • 3
    Has more than enough languages for any developer
  • 3
    Better autocompletes than Atom
  • 3
    Emmet preinstalled
  • 3
    'batteries included'
  • 3
    More tools to integrate with vs
  • 2
    VS Code Server: Browser version of VS Code
  • 2
    Big extension marketplace
  • 2
    Customizable
  • 2
    Microsoft
  • 2
    Light
  • 2
    Fast and ruby is built right in
  • 2
    CMake support with autocomplete
  • 187
    Intelligent ide
  • 128
    Smart development environment
  • 108
    Easy js debugging
  • 97
    Code inspection
  • 95
    Support for the Latest Technologies
  • 55
    Created by jetbrains
  • 53
    Cross-platform ide
  • 36
    Integration
  • 30
    Spellchecker
  • 24
    Language Mixing/Injection
  • 11
    Debugger
  • 10
    Local History
  • 8
    Web developer can't live without this
  • 7
    Fast search
  • 7
    Git support
  • 6
    Angular.js support
  • 6
    Sass autocompletion
  • 5
    Better refactoring options
  • 5
    FTP
  • 5
    There is no need to setup plugins (all from the box)
  • 5
    Show color on the border next to hex string in CSS
  • 5
    Smart autocompletion
  • 5
    JSON Schema
  • 5
    Awesome
  • 5
    Built-in js debugger
  • 5
    Running and debugging Node.js apps remotely
  • 4
    Easy to use
  • 4
    A modern IDE stuck in the 90s
  • 4
    TypeScript support
  • 4
    Smart coding assistance for React
  • 4
    Node.js integration
  • 4
    111
  • 4
    Protractor support out of the box
  • 4
    Intelligent
  • 4
    Paid but easy to crack
  • 3
    Dart support
  • 3
    Solid intelligent features
  • 3
    Great app
  • 3
    Integrated terminal
  • 3
    Vagrant and SSH Console
  • 3
    Free for students
  • 3
    Unused imports inspection
  • 3
    Docker intergration
  • 2
    Remote Files Syncronization
  • 2
    Grate debug tools for React Apps
  • 2
    Easier to keep running than eclipse
  • 1
    Auto imports
  • 1
    Vim support
  • 1
    Rename helpers
  • 1
    Auto refactoring helpers
  • 1
    Less autocompletion
  • 1
    GIT partial commits

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Cons of Visual Studio Code
Cons of WebStorm
  • 46
    Slow startup
  • 29
    Resource hog at times
  • 20
    Poor refactoring
  • 16
    Microsoft
  • 13
    Poor UI Designer
  • 11
    Weak Ui design tools
  • 10
    Poor autocomplete
  • 8
    Super Slow
  • 8
    Microsoft sends telemetry data
  • 7
    Poor in PHP
  • 7
    Huge cpu usage with few installed extension
  • 6
    It's MicroSoft
  • 3
    No built in live Preview
  • 3
    No Built in Browser Preview
  • 3
    Poor in Python
  • 3
    Electron
  • 3
    No color Intergrator
  • 3
    Very basic for java development and buggy at times
  • 2
    Powered by Electron
  • 2
    Bad Plugin Architecture
  • 1
    Terminal does not identify path vars sometimes
  • 1
    Slow C++ Language Server
  • 4
    Paid
  • 1
    Expensive

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What is Visual Studio Code?

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

What is WebStorm?

WebStorm is a lightweight and intelligent IDE for front-end development and server-side JavaScript.

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What are some alternatives to Visual Studio Code and WebStorm?
Atom
At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.
Visual Studio
Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications.
Eclipse
Standard Eclipse package suited for Java and plug-in development plus adding new plugins; already includes Git, Marketplace Client, source code and developer documentation. Click here to file a bug against Eclipse Platform.
IntelliJ IDEA
Out of the box, IntelliJ IDEA provides a comprehensive feature set including tools and integrations with the most important modern technologies and frameworks for enterprise and web development with Java, Scala, Groovy and other languages.
PyCharm
PyCharm’s smart code editor provides first-class support for Python, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, CSS, popular template languages and more. Take advantage of language-aware code completion, error detection, and on-the-fly code fixes!
See all alternatives