dbt vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
dbt
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
dbt is an SQL development environment, developed by Fishtown Analytics, now known as dbt Labs. The vendor states that with dbt, analysts take ownership of the entire analytics engineering workflow, from writing data transformation code to deployment and documentation. dbt Core is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, and paid Teams and Enterprise editions are available.
$0
per month per seat
Visual Studio
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Visual Studio (now in the 2022 edition) is a 64-bit IDE that makes it easier to work with bigger projects and complex workloads, boasting a fluid and responsive experience for users. The IDE features IntelliCode, its automatic code completion tools that understand code context and that can complete up to a whole line at once to drive accurate and confident coding.
$45
per month
Pricing
dbtMicrosoft Visual Studio
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
dbtVisual Studio
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
dbtMicrosoft Visual Studio
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
dbtMicrosoft Visual Studio
Data Transformations
Comparison of Data Transformations features of Product A and Product B
dbt
9.5
7 Ratings
16% above category average
Microsoft Visual Studio
-
Ratings
Simple transformations10.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Complex transformations9.17 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Modeling
Comparison of Data Modeling features of Product A and Product B
dbt
9.0
7 Ratings
12% above category average
Microsoft Visual Studio
-
Ratings
Data model creation9.57 Ratings00 Ratings
Metadata management8.57 Ratings00 Ratings
Business rules and workflow8.97 Ratings00 Ratings
Collaboration10.05 Ratings00 Ratings
Testing and debugging8.17 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
dbtMicrosoft Visual Studio
Small Businesses
Skyvia
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Score 9.8 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
Score 8.0 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
Score 8.0 out of 10
PyCharm
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Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
dbtMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(9 ratings)
9.0
(105 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
9.5
(2 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(15 ratings)
User Testimonials
dbtMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
dbt Labs
The prerequisite is that you have a supported database/data warehouse and have already found a way to ingest your raw data. Then dbt is very well suited to manage your transformation logic if the people using it are familiar with SQL. If you want to benefit from bringing engineering practices to data, dbt is a great fit. It can bring CI/CD practices, version control, automated testing, documentation generation, etc. It is not so well suited if the people managing the transformation logic do not like to code (in SQL) but prefer graphical user interfaces.
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Microsoft
It's useful for app development, debugging, and testing. I've been using it for two years and have seen it grow into a fantastic tool. All of the features, NuGet packages, and settings that enable different types of projects are fantastic. It also has a connection to Azure DevOps and Git. It's a fantastic product that's simple to use.
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Pros
dbt Labs
  • dbt supports version control through GIT, this allows teams to collaborate and track the data transformation logic.
  • dbt allows us to build data models which helps to break complex transformation logic into simple and smaller logic.
  • dbt is completely based on SQL which allows data analyst and data engineers to build the transformation logic.
  • dbt can be easily integrated with snowflake.
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Microsoft
  • Since Microsoft offers a free Community Edition of the IDE many of our new developers have used it at home or school and are very familiar with the user interface, requiring little training to move up to the paid, enterprise-friendly editions we use.
  • The online community support for Visual Studio is outstanding, as solid or better than any other commercial or open-source project software.
  • Microsoft continuously keeps the product up to date and has maintained a history of doing so. They use it internally for their own development so there is little chance it will ever fall out of favor and become unsupported.
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Cons
dbt Labs
  • Field-level lineage (currently at table level)
  • Documentation inheritance - if a field is documented the downstream field of the same name could inherit the doc info
  • Adding python model support (in beta now)
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Microsoft
  • Certain settings and features can sometimes be challenging to locate. The interface isn't always intuitive.
  • Sometimes there are too many ways to do the same thing. For example, users can quickly add a new workspace in Source Control Explorer when a local path shows as "Not Mapped," but it doesn't indicate that the user might want to check the dropdown list of workspaces. The shortcut of creating a new workspace by clicking on the "Not Mapped" link can lead to developers creating too many workspaces and causing workspace management to become unwieldy. If the shortcut link were removed, the user would be forced to use the Workspace dropdown. While it can add an extra step to the process, workspaces would be managed more easily, and this would enforce consistency. At the very least, there should be a high-level administrative setting to hide the shortcut link.
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Likelihood to Renew
dbt Labs
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
VS is the best and is required for building Microsoft applications. The quality and usefulness of the product far out-weight the licensing costs associated with it.
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Usability
dbt Labs
It requires proficiency with SQL coding and with git practices, but with these prerequisites, it is easy to use. Especially with the dbt cloud, you get a nice interface that makes all the administrative tasks like scheduling jobs quite easy. I also like the built-in SQL editor with syntax highlighting and auto-completion.
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Microsoft
The thing I like the most is Visual Studio doesn't suffer from Microsoft's over eager marketing department who feel they need to redesign the UI (think Office and windows) which forces users to loose large amounts of productivity having to learn software that they had previously known.
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Support Rating
dbt Labs
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Between online forums like StackOverflow, online documentation, MSDN forums, and the customer support options, I find it very easy to get support for Visual Studio IDE when I need it. If desired, one can also download the MSDN documentation about the IDE and have it readily available for any support needs.
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Alternatives Considered
dbt Labs
I actually don't know what the alternative to dbt is. I'm sure one must exist other than more 'roll your own' options like Apache Airflow, say, bu tin terms of super easy managed/cloud data transforms, dbt really does seem to be THE tool to use. It's $50/month per dev, BUT there's a FREE version for 1 dev seat with no read-only access for anyone else, so you can always start with that and then buy yourself a seat later.
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Microsoft
I personally feel Visual Studio IDE has [a] better interface and [is more] user friendly than other IDEs. It has better code maintainability and intellisense. Its inbuilt team foundation server help coders to check on their code then and go. Better nugget package management, quality testing and gives features to extract TRX file as result of testing which includes all the summary of each test case.
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Return on Investment
dbt Labs
  • Simplified our BI layer for faster load times
  • Increased the quality of data reaching our end users
  • Makes complex transformations manageable
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Microsoft
  • We've had hundreds of hours saved by the rapid development that Visual Studio provides.
  • We've lost some time in the Xamarin updates. However, being cross platform, we ultimately saved tons of time not having to create separate apps for iOS and Android.
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ScreenShots