Considering you get a better integrated environment rather than something designed more heavily around plugins you also get unquestionably much better refactoring tools.

One thing to note that I just learned: You cannot opt out of anonymous data collection if you use the free non-commercial license. (I'd probably still trust Jetbrains over Microsoft, but that's me)

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/10/24/webstorm-and-ride...

I'd definitely recommend trying it out now that it's free. Your taste may vary.

Hi, I'm the maintainer for the VSCode F# support. Rider support for F# is great, that team is very engaged, and I'd strongly consider it if

* you have mixed C#/F# projects in a solution (C# and F# support in VSCode can't communicate today)

* you use Rider for other technology

* you want paid support for your editor tools

* you prefer IDE-style experiences rather than editor/ extension-style experiences

* you want to take advantage of Rider features like their accelerated build caching

In my experience, Rider's support for F# is much more stable and usable than Ionide, or even Visual Studio proper.