JetBrains has been working on its Visual Studio competitor, Rider, for almost two years, but this week marks its exit from beta and into the realm of retail. The cross-platform .NET and web development IDE has a lot to offer, though its subscription-based pricing may see it struggle against Microsoft.
Unfortunately, if you’ve been enjoying Rider for free as part of the beta, unless you’re a student or working on an open-source project, the ride (so to speak) is over. All licenses are subscription-based, with the cheapest offering coming in at $US139 ($175) per year. For businesses, this goes up to $US349 ($440).
A “perpetual fallback license” is available, which requires paying for a 12-month subscription, either all-up or cumulatively.
While the pricing compares favourably to Visual Studio, with the Professional version setting you back $714, it doesn’t hold a candle to extremely functional and free Visual Studio Community, which is perfectly adequate for everyone except enterprise users.
On Rider’s side is the fact it has JetBrains’ ReSharper built-in, which is a big plus. It also runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, something Visual Studio doesn’t offer, unless you go with Visual Studio Code.
I’m glad for the competition, but even with its competitive pricing, Rider is going to be a hard sell to a lot of .NET developers.
Rider 2017.1 – JetBrains .NET IDE hits RTM [JetBrains]
Comments
2 responses to “JetBrains Has Officially Released Rider, Its Cross-Platform C# And .NET IDE”
JetBrains IDEs are excellent, they’re orders of magnitude better than any competitor in the Java and PHP development spaces. The pricing is also some of the most fair I’ve seen from any software.
Granted they don’t have plans for a community edition at the moment, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t move that way in the next 12 months.
What may be difficult is getting large-scale teams to switch over, but if Rider is anywhere near as good as IntelliJ and PhpStorm then for individual developers it should only take using it for a month to see how good it is.
There is a full blown visual studio for mac though, not sure what languages it supports though.