It depends on what language you develop in and how complex of an IDE you want. Visual Studio Code "VSCode" should not be confused with Visual Studio. They are completely two different IDEs. VSCode is a very streamlined IDE. Probably more similar to Atom or Sublime. VSCode is on the opposite end of Visual Studio and products from JetBrains like InteliJ, PHPStorm, and WebStorm. I've been using VSCode for front-end web development. Specifically coding in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Here's a link that lists the native language support provided by VSCode: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/overview There are many Language Extension that can be downloaded VSCode. VSCode is getting updates every month. I believe it's a great tool and I use it on a daily basis. I do recommend it.