Rider Community Edition

Dear Rider Team,

I've came across your product through various youtubers while learning new .NET Technologies.

Upon visiting the website I saw that Rider is a cross platform IDE for .NET devs which essentially means

your IDE is devoid of all the clutter from .NET Framework and everything that is WinOS specific.

Which is in my opinion makes your product superior by default.

But I also realized that there's no "Community" Edition for hobbyists and students who are not making money out 

of the product.

I believe it would be a wise move from Jetbrains side to open such version in order to introduce your product to the wider public 

and encourage a wave of future software engineers who'd prefer your product over the competition.

 

Kind regards,

Daniel.

84
38 comments

Hello @...

 

Thanks for your feedback

 

Regrettably, at this time, we're not planning to release a Community Edition. We may revisit this decision at a later date, but there are no plans to change this in the short term. However, we do have special offers - for students, teachers, Open Source developers, and more. You can refer to this page to learn more.

 

Also, note that Ride EAPs are distributed free of charge.

-23

Hi wai not received order

-2

Ciobanuconstantin02,

If you have any problems purchasing Rider, please contact our Sales team via this form.

Thank you!

-8

I support the decision of a "community" version of Rider. This is because currently in Linux there is no longer an easy way to program in C #, VSCode has many bugs and MonoDevelop does not support .Net 5, much less will it support .Net 6. It is already an obsolete product. Jetbrains is the only decent alternative that users have left, so we asked them to create a community version.

28

As of 2022, this is still a very real debate. I've been enjoying the student edition quite a lot, however when I finish my studies I'll be forced into dual-booting because HR won't pay for a Linux-fan when there's a free option right ahead.

5
If it would be good to have a "community" version of Rider, for you to make it known, remember that developers are the ones who promote the purchase of licenses in companies. It would also be nice to have a Spanish version.
14

It would be perfect to have a "community" version.

8

I've always wondered why so many who I've encountered distain the use of IDEs, and I never understood that, until I got into C# development (not through Unity) and was forced to use Visual Studio or be thrown into the deep end trying to figure out how to compile my code in VS Code (I never figured it out.) Visual Studio often feels like an IDE from the 2000s.

I've used other JetBrains IDEs such as IntelliJ, PyCharm, and CLion, and loved them all. It just saddens me that there doesn't exist a community version for Rider to do hobbyist, open-source C# projects.

7

I don't really understand why not release a community version as you did with IDEA. I am primarily a Java developer with an IDEA Ultimate subscription who convinced my project management to switch from Eclipse just because I could use endless EAPs of IDEA Ultimate in my hobby projects (there was no community version at the time) and I loved it. After all cooler talks with other developers and management, they got interested and now thousands of people in our company use IDEA Ultimate as their IDE of choice. I was so happy to see a community edition so I could recommend it to beginners who ask me which IDE should they use to learn Java, but for some reason, you are not considering Rider Community as a thing. While it's basically IDEA for C#, I cannot recommend it to people because I can't use this for my pet projects and there is no way I'll pay a subscription to write a few hundred lines of code "just for fun" once in a while so my default answer for recommended IDE for C# is Visual Studio because that's what I use if I want to play a bit with .NET.

8

EAPs are distributed free of charge.

-2

I know but they are not always available. Imagine the following scenario (which is painfully real): you spend 3-4 hours every Friday on your { pet, open source, nonprofit } projects so your evaluation period lasts roughly 15 hours of your life, and like 2 of them working with IDE. Can you come to conclusion about the quality of a tool? I'm not.

Community edition allows people to get familiar with the tool and make a decision about buying it. Too bad Rider and CLion don't have one. 30 days trial is way worse in that regard IMO.

4

Jetbrains does an awesome job of helping developers world over by liberally offering discounts and community editions and encouraging open source projects.

I beseech you to kindly extend the magnanimity to offer community editions of all your IDEs...

God bless you all, in all that concerns you!

1

Defo support this, I genuinely dislike VSCode, there are so many little things it does that just makes working with it a hassle, so when I'm talking to people that want to get started with C#, for unity for example I want to be able to recommend Jetbrains, because it's genuinely a much friendlier user experience, but asking them to cough up £120 per year or more is a no go.

I feel like this is a terrible business decision, because HAVING to recommend they use VSCode essentially locks them into that workflow.

I'd love to see this decision reversed, because I'd love to be able to recommend Jetbrains to people trying to get into C# development.

4

I don't fully dislike VSCode, but it's nowhere near a viable alternative to visual studio community. I want to move on from windows, but other than Rider, there's no real alternative to develop apps in .Net core, and Rider is just too expensive. Not only that, but as it currently is, the trial version was so slow I decided to immediately remove it.
I don't mind paying for a community edition, just not that much. Especially after the release of Win11, I think a lot of developers are looking to switch to linux permanently.

1

I definitely prefer Rider to visual studio, BUT since there is no community edition and I cannot afford a license being a solo indie developer, there is no other option for me. EAP versions are ok but when there's a new release my work is being held back since there are no new EAPs for a while, so I stick to VS as I prefer not to switch IDE's every few months.

1

I am the IDEA Ultimate user at work and I love it! For my private hobby projects I would really like to use Rider at home. A community edition would be such a great fit for folks like me!

Also, if a free community edition is not an option how about a revenue based pricing similar to Unreal engine? Say if your company makes less than $100k/year you get a free license? Or maybe for a really small fee like $20/year?

2

A community edition of Rider is a great idea for JetBrains and for users. When I introduce a new developer to C#, we need to choose between VSCode (very limited) or VS Community Edition (Very slow, somewhat limited). New developers are not likely to commit to a paid license, but as they develop their skills they will evaluate the benefits of the paid version of what they are already using. Do you want that to be Visual Studio or Rider?

0
Hello Charles,

Regrettably, at this time we're not planning to release a Community Edition; we may revisit this decision at a later date, but there are no current plans at this time.

As for the new developers, they may use either [Rider EAPs](https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/eap/), which are distributed free of charge. Or use a trial period. Note that every [major version](https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/whatsnew/) has its new trial period.
They might want to check out the information about [Rider complimentary licenses](https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/buy/#discounts?billing=yearly).

Should you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask. Have a great day!
-5

It might be worth to revisit now, since Microsoft announced yesterday to discontinue VS for Mac soon. VS for Mac and Rider are probably the only two IDEs available for .NET development on Mac with a complete tool set and support for the latest language and framework versions. Linux users would be happy as well, they have the same issue since the discontinuation of Mono Develop (which VS for Mac is based upon).

For now, I am happy with EAPs, RCs and Nightlies. Thank you for providing each with a fresh testing period.

1

Hi everyone,

There is a big discount program started today: https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2023/09/01/65-off-rider/. We offer 65 percent off for a couple of days. Do not miss it :)

-3
Hi there,

Thank you for the feedback!

Good news: for any user who decides to purchase a new, Rider annual personal subscription we have a time-limited discount in place (the offer ends Monday, September 4, at 6:00 am UTC) of 65%! :)  

Please, take a look here for more details: https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2023/09/01/65-off-rider/. 

In case of any questions, please, reach out to sales@jetbrains.com.
-3

now would be a great time for you to have a community edition. 

i just watched an Unreal C++ tutorial and Rider does really look very good and i would really like to try it. Unfortunately, 30 days trial is not long enough to even bother installing, as i'd only be able to use it a small amount of hours before the trial expired. and the subscription prices are way to high to just give it shot.

So, i'll have to stick to Visual Studio …

1

IDEA has a community edition, so why not provide a community edition for Rider as well?

Please don't treat C# developers differently than Java developers.

5

Its been over 3 years and still no “Community Edition”. I really liked Intellij when I was mainly coding Java. Now that I went back to C# I can sadly not continue to use Jetbrains programs as a hobbyist. I guess I'll dust off my old experience with Visual Studio of when I studied Game Development with Unity. I'm disappointed really.

2

While I find it very likely that a community edition of Rider would increase sales, instead of leading hobbiests away from an upgradable edition of Rider and to Visual Studio Community Edition and VSCode, since I already know about and have used rider, I just bought my own license. It isn't very expensive for what you get, even for hobby projects.

0

Note that in both Fortune 500 companies I have worked for, it is very hard to get funding for something just by asking. It is much easier to use a free version, then I can say, “I rely on this, and I need XYZ feature, available for only a few hundred dollars, to improve productivity”.

That is when the money comes. I understand that not all software teams work this way, but this is the way I have seen repeatedly.

1

When I started reading this thread, I regrettably admit that I had a similar attitude towards this issue as that which the downvoters of some of the comments presumably had/have.

Then I read those comments, and realised JetBrains is being fairly reasonable in their promotion of special discounts and EAPs. Yet those comments were still downvoted.

This seems pretty greedy and rude to me…like the 65% discount that was around for 2 days last year seems like a really great deal to me; a fully-functional, excellent .NET IDE that *just works* on all three major OSes, instead of having to mess around with extensions in VS Code, and dotnet CLI commands.

I get it; if you're an indie developer or not even making money *at all* off your projects, ~US$164/year (what I was offered when requesting a quote, including local taxes) is a lot to cough up. But $57.40 is very reasonable, and I would have gladly signed up for this price - assuming that the price doesn't suddenly jump up to the norm after a year.

So JetBrains, is this the general case with the special discounts that I have heard anecdotally you do occasionally offer? And I'm not talking about the student/teacher, MVP or other circumstantial discounts here; I'm talking about the 65% discount for *any* regular user that was offered in September 2023.

If you don't regularly offer discounts like this, or if the price suddenly doubles after a year, then you kind of deserve all the downvotes IMHO. Otherwise, I would gladly subscribe for such a price the next time that it's offered.

0

I would love to try Rider, but for working on open source projects, using Rider would discourage collaboration since time-to-start would be affected by whether or not the other people happen to have Rider. The current open-source offering works for large projects with regular contributors, but for smaller projects, it's a dead end.

0

Being an Intellij Idea (java) community edition user for 10+ years and starting to do a bit of c# I have to admit I was disappointed to not find the equivalent (rider without database, docker, cleanup tool, etc…support) and have to use vscode (cause of linux in my case) which is fine but even with the idea keybinding you need to learn some new ways to setup things around tests, debugging and friends.

I clearly support getting a community edition of Rider if there is a small opportunity it happens.

0

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