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Visual Studio finder · no jargon until the answer
Professional or Enterprise, subscription or perpetual, monthly or three-year, or the free one — the names are confusing and the wrong choice costs either money or a licence audit. Say what you do, not what you think the product is called, and the answer comes with the price and the way to buy. If the free edition is allowed for you, it says so.
1 · What do you need it for?
Three quick checks
2 · Who are you?
3 · How many developers?
4 · For how long?
5 · Advanced testing or debugging?
6 · Are you small enough for the free edition?
The answer
The one question that decides most cases
Everything else is detail. The editor alone is Visual Studio Professional, bought once or by the month. Installing Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint or Exchange on test machines needs a Visual Studio subscription — the thing people still call MSDN — because the subscription is what licenses those installs. Without it, every test SQL Server is a full production licence.
Free. For individuals, open source, academia, and organisations with five or fewer developers, fewer than 250 PCs and under $1 million revenue. No dev/test software rights, no Azure credit. If you qualify, buy nothing.
The editor and Azure DevOps. Perpetual: one payment, that version for ever. Monthly: cancel any month, for contractors and short projects. Neither includes the dev/test software catalogue or the Azure credit.
Professional or Enterprise. The editor plus the dev/test catalogue, Azure credit, GitHub Enterprise, support. Bought under Open Value: three annual payments, perpetual after year three. The right answer for permanent developers who run test environments.
Questions
Yes, if the organisation has five or fewer users of it, fewer than 250 PCs and under $1 million in annual revenue; larger organisations may use it only for open source, academic research or classroom learning. It has no dev/test software rights and no Azure credit.
The product is the same editor. The subscription adds the right to install Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange and other Microsoft software for development and testing, a $50 monthly Azure credit, GitHub Enterprise, support incidents and new versions. Buy the plain editor when you install nothing else; buy the subscription when you do.
For Test Plans (test case management), load and performance testing, IntelliTrace, Live Unit Testing, code maps and architecture validation, or Microsoft 365 Apps production use for developers. It costs about five times Professional; most teams do not need it.
No. A subscription is licensed to a named person. For contractors, buy the monthly cloud subscription in their name and cancel when they leave; or, if they install dev/test software, a Professional subscription assigned to them for the engagement.
No. We sell to legal entities: companies, registered sole traders, non-profits and public bodies, invoiced in their name. An individual buys from Microsoft directly: Visual Studio Community free if eligible, the monthly Professional subscription on the Visual Studio Marketplace, or a Standard subscription from the Microsoft Store. The finder says so when you untick the legal-entity box.
It is the old name for Visual Studio subscriptions, renamed in 2016. People who ask for MSDN want the dev/test software rights and the Azure credit, which is exactly what the subscription is.
No. Visual Studio subscriptions license software for development and testing only. A production SQL Server or Windows Server needs its own licence; our calculators price them.
Get this quoted
Your answers and the recommendation are attached. You get back the price for your country, the purchase route, and who should hold which licence. Two things about the channel: Microsoft does not sell Standard subscriptions through CSP, so we supply them under Open Value (a three-year agreement, from five licences), and the monthly cloud subscription through CSP. Enterprise Agreements are sold only by Microsoft-authorised Licensing Solution Partners; we are not one, and an organisation of 500 or more that wants an EA should ask Microsoft for an LSP. And we sell to legal entities only; individuals buy directly from Microsoft.