As announced recently, Microsoft is merging the Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate editions into a single, new edition – Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise. This is a free upgrade for active Visual Studio 2013 Premium w/MSDN subscribers – until your subscription renews. At the point of renewal, there will be a slight increase in price (actual price will vary based on whether or not you are buying a single subscription or if your company has a volume licensing agreement, etc.) to maintain the Enterprise subscription.
I recently wrote up a comparison between Visual Studio 2013 Premium w/MSDN and Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise w/MSDN highlighting the new features that you will gain, as a Visual Studio w/MSDN subscriber, when you are upgraded to Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise w/MSDN. However, you might also be wondering, what features will I lose if I choose not to continue with the Enterprise subscription when my subscription period renews and downgrade to Visual Studio 2015 Professional w/MSDN.
Here’s a list of features (based on the information that is available today) that currently exist in Visual Studio 2013 Premium w/MSDN (i.e. the features that you’re used to having access to today) that are not available in Visual Studio 2015 Professional w/MSDN – i.e. the features that you would lose if you choose to downgrade to Visual Studio 2015 Professional w/MSDN at your next renewal period.
- Testing Tools
- Microsoft Fakes (Unit Test Isolation)
- Code Coverage
- Coded UI Testing
- Manual Testing
- Exploratory Testing
- Test Case Management
- Fast-forward for Manual Testing
- Integrated Development Environment
- Code Clone
- Architecture and Modeling
- Architecture Validation
- UML 2.0 Compliant Diagrams (Activity, Use Case, Sequence, Class and Component)
- Lab Management
- Virtual environment setup & teardown
- Provision environment from template
- Checkpoint environment
- Team Foundation Server
- Web-based Test Case Management
- Request and Manage Feedback
- Release Management
- Visual Studio Online Services
- Web-based Test Case Management
- Request and Manage Feedback
- MSDN Subscription Software and Services for Production Use
- Office Professional Plus
- MSDN Subscription Software for Development and Testing
- Microsoft Azure – Decreases from $100-USD credit per month to $50-USD credit per month
- Microsoft SharePoint
- Microsoft Exchange
- Microsoft Office
- Microsoft Dynamics
- All other Microsoft servers
- Other MSDN Subscription Benefits
- Pluralsight training – Decreases from 20 courses for 12 months to 10 courses for 3 months
- Office 365 Developer Subscription
- Technical support incidents – Decreases from 4 to 2
- Microsoft e-learning collections (per year) – Decreases from 2 to 1
If you would like to see the full list of features for Visual Studio 2013, click here. Likewise, to see the full list of features for Visual Studio 2015, click here.
If you are not making use of the features listed above, then it probably makes sense to move to Visual Studio 2015 Professional w/MSDN (or possibly another edition) when the timing is right. If you do make use of these features, then you will want to stick with Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise w/MSDN knowing that it will eventually cost a little more than what you’re paying for Visual Studio 2013 Premium w/MSDN today. Regardless, assuming you have an active subscription, you’ll at least get to enjoy it for FREE for a while 
just had notification from Microsoft that Code Lense will be included in 2015 Professional.
Yep, you can verify this by viewing the Visual Studio 2015 offerings.
Hi
We have Premium and Ultimate 2013 licenses. Even though they get merged to 2015 Enterprise, are we allowed to downgrade to 2015 Professional even before the renewal? Basically all Premium users get Professional and all Ultimate get Enterprise.
Is there an official statement by Microsoft regarding this?
And what does “slight increase in price” means roughly?
Thank you!