
Although it’s true that setting up VS Code for Python is mostly just a matter of installing Microsoft’s excellent Python extension, P圜harm still makes many things easier than VS Code.

So if you are brand new to Python and don’t already have some familiarity with VS Code, then P圜harm Community Edition is a clear winner here.

VS Code, on the other hand, is a free, general-purpose code editor with a variety of IDE features available as extensions for different languages. P圜harm is built by JetBrains, the company behind the Java IDE, IntelliJ IDEA.

The Professional Edition is not a free product but allows you to install excellent plugins that support many other use cases well. P圜harm is a purpose-built IDE that specializes in Python development, so for that narrow niche and a few other tasks, the free Community Edition is outstanding. We will explore the winners and losers over a variety of categories shortly, but to give a summary up front, the difference boils down to just some core differences in the approach.

This is not just some pathological love of variety, but rather because there are things that they both do so well that I’ve come to rely on them for those tasks. In fact, they are so different in their approaches that I use both in my daily work. The first thing that we must stress at the beginning about P圜harm and VS Code is that they are not both trying to solve the exact same problem.
