Visual Studio licences for development teams

Visual Studio is Microsoft's environment for building applications for Windows, the web, servers and phones, in C#, C++, Python, JavaScript and other languages.

Professional is for individual developers and small teams. Enterprise adds the tools large teams need: automated testing at scale, code architecture analysis and debugging applications in production.

Compared with Community and Code. Visual Studio Community is free and has almost everything Professional has, but its licence restricts it in companies. A large organisation (more than 250 computers or more than 1 million US dollars in annual revenue) can't use it for commercial development, and a smaller one can use it with no more than 5 users. Visual Studio Code is a different program: a free code editor, without the visual designers or the profiling tools of the full environment. You buy Professional when your team outgrows the Community limits.

Visual Studio is licensed per person, not per computer: every developer who uses it needs their own licence and can install it on several computers. The licences in the shop are perpetual, without the Visual Studio subscription, so without its benefits (Azure credits, software for development and testing).

Which Windows it runs on. For a Windows 11 computer, choose Visual Studio 2019. Versions 2017 and 2015 run on Windows 7 SP1, 8.1 and 10, version 2013 on Windows 7 SP1 and 8.1, and 2010 on Windows XP, Vista and 7. None of them runs on a Mac.