What are the limitations of the free Visual Studio Online license?

Question

On the Visual Studio Online website there is a free account option. It says that this account offers the following benefits:

• 5 basic user licenses FREE
• Unlimited participants
• Unlimited qualified MSDN subscribers
• Unlimited private code repositories and team projects
• Follow-up of FREE work items for all users
• 60 minutes/month free compilation
• 20 thousand minutes of virtual user/month of FREE load test
• Analysis and monitoring of VIEW applications

It turns out this is too much. Private repositories on Github are paid for and this account offers unlimited private repositories for free. As it seems to have a lot of advantage I was wondering about the limitations of this account.

What limitations does this license offer? Can commercial projects be hosted there or only open source or free projects? It’s like Visual Studio Community that can be used without limitations for developers working outside companies?

Answer 1

This is exactly what you described. Microsoft cannot give too many advantages to its users? :)

Any project can be hosted there. Anyone can use under any circumstances.

In fact it is not so advantageous so for some types of users. If more than 5 people can access the project you have to go for paid. But if your team is small, it’s free. There’s no catch. And you can also have extra users as long as they have an active paid account on MSDN (which comes along with some editions of Visual Studio).

Note that it is possible to access work items and some other things by users outside the project without restriction. That is, all of your users can see and include tickets, monitor the progress of the project. They just can’t access the project as a whole and run anything, and it’s probably not what you really want.

As far as I know is not yet available in Portuguese (this may be outdated).

For teams like this I doubt that the other limitations are too problematic, and in fact are even on top of things that Github, for example, does not offer (now not Microsoft hand offers something quite similar).

Of course Microsoft isn’t being nice. It’s giving a lot of free stuff to those who can’t afford it. But the competition is also giving it away. It may not be the same thing, but it gives others. It needs to show that it is cheap to use its technologies. And she still makes a lot of money from the people who need it the most, and she can pay for it. These use Microsoft products because they need, free things will not influence them.

Microsoft also hopes that one day you who use free will grow up to be a paying user.

Now it’s called Azure Devops.

And more recently should use the Github Codespaces.