PyCharm vs Visual Studio Code

Overview

PyCharm

Stacks28.4K

Followers24.2K

Votes451

Visual Studio Code

Stacks186.5K

Followers169.1K

Votes2.3K

GitHub Stars178.2K

Forks35.9K

PyCharm vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

PyCharm and Visual Studio Code are two popular Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). Let's explore the key differences between them.

User Interface: PyCharm provides a more comprehensive and fully-featured user interface, offering a rich and professional IDE experience with advanced debugging and profiling tools. On the other hand, Visual Studio Code presents a lightweight and minimalist user interface, focusing on simplicity and extensibility, with a wide range of available extensions and customization options.
Code Editing: PyCharm offers powerful coding assistance and intelligent code completion, providing helpful suggestions and auto-imports for Python modules. It also includes specialized features for Django, Flask, and other frameworks. While Visual Studio Code also provides code completion and suggestions, it may require additional extensions to match the level of code intelligence provided by PyCharm.
Integrated Tools and Plugins: PyCharm comes bundled with a comprehensive set of built-in tools for version control (e.g., Git), testing frameworks, databases, and web development. It offers seamless integration with popular Python tools such as virtual environments and package managers. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, relies heavily on the use of plugins and extensions to provide similar functionalities, allowing developers to customize their environment with tools of their choice.
Performance: PyCharm is built on the IntelliJ platform, which may take up significant system resources and result in slower startup and indexing times compared to Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio Code, being a lightweight IDE, generally offers faster performance and quicker startup times.
Community and Ecosystem: PyCharm has a well-established and mature community with extensive documentation and support forums. It is widely used in the Python development community, which results in a large number of available resources and tutorials. Visual Studio Code, being developed by Microsoft, benefits from its extensive community and ecosystem, offering a wide range of community-driven extensions, themes, and integrations with other Microsoft tools.
Pricing: PyCharm offers both paid and free community editions, with the paid versions providing additional features and support for web and enterprise development. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, is completely free and open-source, making it an attractive choice for developers who prefer a cost-effective solution.

In summary, PyCharm offers a comprehensive and feature-rich IDE experience with advanced tools and tighter integration for Python development, whereas Visual Studio Code provides a lightweight and extensible environment with a wide range of community-driven extensions and a simplified user interface.

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Advice on PyCharm, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

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.

1.36M views1.36M

Comments

christy

Program Manager

Jul 1, 2020

Needs adviceon

Python

Eclipse

IntelliJ IDEA

UPDATE: Thanks for the great response. I am going to start with VSCode based on the open source and free version that will allow me to grow into other languages, but not cost me a license ..yet.

I have been working with software development for 12 years, but I am just beginning my journey to learn to code. I am starting with Python following the suggestion of some of my coworkers. They are split between Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA for IDEs that they use and PyCharm is new to me. Which IDE would you suggest for a beginner that will allow expansion to Java, JavaScript, and eventually AngularJS and possibly mobile applications?

2.03M views2.03M

Comments

Samriddhi

Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling

Sep 26, 2020

Decided

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.

1.04M views1.04M

Comments

Detailed Comparison

PyCharm	Visual Studio Code
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!	Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
Syntax highlighting;Auto-Indentation and code formatting;Code completion;Line and block commenting;On-the-fly error highlighting;Code snippets;Code folding	Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 178.2K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 35.9K
Stacks 28.4K	Stacks 186.5K
Followers 24.2K	Followers 169.1K
Votes 451	Votes 2.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros 112 Smart auto-completion 93 Intelligent code analysis 77 Powerful refactoring 60 Virtualenv integration 54 Git integration Cons 10 Slow startup 7 Not very flexible 6 Resource hog 3 Periodic slow menu response 1 Pricey for full features	Pros 341 Powerful multilanguage IDE 310 Fast 194 Front-end develop out of the box 158 Support TypeScript IntelliSense 142 Very basic but free Cons 46 Slow startup 29 Resource hog at times 20 Poor refactoring 14 Poor UI Designer 11 Weak Ui design tools
Integrations
Django Python	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to PyCharm, Visual Studio Code?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

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.

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a PHP IDE which keeps up with latest PHP & web languages trends, integrates a variety of modern tools, and brings even more extensibility with support for major PHP frameworks.

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.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications.

WebStorm

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

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE is FREE, open source, and has a worldwide community of users and developers.

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

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.

Related Comparisons

PyCharm vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

PyCharm and Visual Studio Code are two popular Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). Let's explore the key differences between them.

User Interface: PyCharm provides a more comprehensive and fully-featured user interface, offering a rich and professional IDE experience with advanced debugging and profiling tools. On the other hand, Visual Studio Code presents a lightweight and minimalist user interface, focusing on simplicity and extensibility, with a wide range of available extensions and customization options.
Code Editing: PyCharm offers powerful coding assistance and intelligent code completion, providing helpful suggestions and auto-imports for Python modules. It also includes specialized features for Django, Flask, and other frameworks. While Visual Studio Code also provides code completion and suggestions, it may require additional extensions to match the level of code intelligence provided by PyCharm.
Integrated Tools and Plugins: PyCharm comes bundled with a comprehensive set of built-in tools for version control (e.g., Git), testing frameworks, databases, and web development. It offers seamless integration with popular Python tools such as virtual environments and package managers. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, relies heavily on the use of plugins and extensions to provide similar functionalities, allowing developers to customize their environment with tools of their choice.
Performance: PyCharm is built on the IntelliJ platform, which may take up significant system resources and result in slower startup and indexing times compared to Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio Code, being a lightweight IDE, generally offers faster performance and quicker startup times.
Community and Ecosystem: PyCharm has a well-established and mature community with extensive documentation and support forums. It is widely used in the Python development community, which results in a large number of available resources and tutorials. Visual Studio Code, being developed by Microsoft, benefits from its extensive community and ecosystem, offering a wide range of community-driven extensions, themes, and integrations with other Microsoft tools.
Pricing: PyCharm offers both paid and free community editions, with the paid versions providing additional features and support for web and enterprise development. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, is completely free and open-source, making it an attractive choice for developers who prefer a cost-effective solution.

PyCharm vs Visual Studio Code

Overview