ReSharper vs CodeRush

  2012-09-09


After an extensive search on Internet, I have found no comprehensive up-to-date information with comparison of ReSharper and CodeRush. These are the most relevant articles that I did find:

http://blog.imagosystems.nl/70/coderushrefactor-vs-resharper/

http://jesseliberty.com/2010/05/28/code-rush-vs-resharper/

http://www.dennisdoomen.net/2010/11/resharper-versus-coderush-through-eyes.html

So I decided to give each product a try, as they both offer a 1 month free trial. First month was with CodeRush 12.1, the second with ReSharper 7.

What I liked about CodeRush:

  • It’s pretty! All the visual effects are just great and very polished.
  • One of its best features for me was the ability to show a complexity metric next to each method. I found the metricitself to be a much more accurate estimate of a method’s complexity/maintainability in comparison to standard cyclomatic complexity.
  • A lot of very nice plug-ins.

What I liked about ReSharper:

  • It gives really excellent suggestions on how to improve your code. I feel a lot more confident about my work, when ReSharper shows a green tick above the scrollbar. CodeRush has a very similar feature, but I found that the suggestions it gives often don’t improve your code quality, but rather just let you know what refactorings are available.
  • It’s possible to define your custom code inspections and how to auto-fix them. This is probably the most important feature for me.
  • It’s simple!

I think when choosing one of these products the question you need to ask yourself is:

“Do I want a tool that can help me maximize my development speed or do I want a tool that can help me maximize the quality of my code?”

I might be wrong, but I have a feeling that ReSharper concentrates on improving the quality of your code, whilst CodeRush focuses on maximizing your development speed.

I personally don’t feel the need for all the templates and automatic refactorings. I am happy to type all the code manually by myself, without any fancy auto-completion. Quality on the other hand is very important to me and I would like to catch as many code-smells and issues as possible.

I am not saying that CodeRush doesn’t improve the quality of your code, because it certainly does, but I just feel that ReSharper does a better job at it. CodeRush on the other hand excels in other areas, and one thing that I love the most is the display of the complexity metric as I’ve mentioned above and of course a rich plug-in ecosystem, which seems a lot more sparse for ReSharper.

All of these are just my opinions after being with each tool for only a month, which isn’t that much to really know all the ins and outs of the tool. Nonetheless I drew my conclusion and going with ReSharper.

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