e² studio vs Visual Micro
e² studio
renesas.comVisual Micro
visualmicro.comSide by side
| Figure | e² studio | Visual Micro |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $1.58/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 4 |
| Spec score · Embedded Development IDEs | 7.9 (#8) | 7.4 (#16) |
| Company | Renesas Electronics Corporation is headquartered in Toyosu, Tokyo, Japan, and was established on November 1, 2002; it began operations on April 1, 2010. | Visual Micro Limited is registered in England under number 8093282, and the shop page says it is located in Birmingham, UK. |
| Debugging | Debugging uses Eclipse CDT's GDB and supports features including register and memory views, breakpoints, real-time memory display, tracing, and peripheral-register display. | Its serial debugger supports boards with a serial interface and includes charting, performance statistics, and break and trace points. |
| Headquarters | Tokyo, Japan | Birmingham, UK |
| Product | e² studio is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment for Renesas microcontrollers, covering development from sample-code download through debugging. | Visual Micro provides an Arduino-compatible IDE within Visual Studio with coding, build, upload, and debugging tools. |
Plans
Visual Micro
- Non-Profit/Hobby — 1 machine, 1 year$19 a year
- Non-Profit/Hobby — 1 machine, perpetual$64.99, paid once
- Commercial — 1 machine, 1 year$75 a year
- Commercial — 1 machine, perpetual$250, paid once
In their own words
e² studio
e² studio is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment for Renesas microcontrollers, supporting work from sample-code access through debugging. Its project wizard creates MCU projects with basic sample code, while Smart Configurator sets clocks, pins, and interrupts and generates code for those settings. The Eclipse CDT editor provides completion, syntax coloring, navigation, folding, automated code constructs, preprocessor checking, and refactoring. Developers can choose Renesas or partner-vendor compilers, but must install them separately; compiler packages are not included in the IDE download. Debugging uses Eclipse CDT's GDB and includes register and memory views, breakpoints, real-time memory display, tracing, and peripheral-register display. Listed hardware includes Renesas E2, E2 Lite, and E20 emulators and SEGGER J-Link. Supported MCU families include RA, RZ, RL78, RX, RH850, and RISC-V. The Linux host version does not support the RE family or Renesas Synergy. e² studio runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS and costs nothing, with no paid version. Separate compiler packages may have their own license terms or evaluation limits.
Visual Micro
Visual Micro has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.