Choose My EF Vibe when…
You live in EF Core LINQ daily, split persistence from API, want SQL visibility without full debug sessions, or want scan gates in PR CI.
How My EF Vibe compares
All EF roads lead to SQL. My EF Vibe is not a general-purpose scratchpad or a DBA IDE — it is built to show the SQL your solution’s DbContext generates: same build, same entities, same provider.
| Capability | My EF Vibe | LINQPad | SSMS / Azure Data Studio | IDE DB tool windows |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Uses your project’s DbContext build |
Yes — Roslyn + project assemblies | Yes (with references) | No | No |
| Startup project / user secrets | -s auto-infer |
Manual setup | N/A | N/A |
| Interactive LINQ REPL | Terminal + VS Code | Primary focus | SQL only | Limited |
| EF translated + executed SQL | Per snippet | With EF driver | Manual queries | Query console |
| Project-wide LINQ scan + CI gate | efvibe scan |
No | No | No |
| EXPLAIN / query plans on LINQ sites | Deep scan + :plan |
Varies | On ad-hoc SQL | On ad-hoc SQL |
| Run repository handler selection | VS Code + adapter | Copy/paste | No | No |
| Open source / CLI in CI | Apache 2.0, headless JSON | Commercial | N/A | N/A |
| License / cost | Free (Apache 2.0) | Paid tiers | Free | Included in IDE |
When to use what
Choose LINQPad when…
You need a rich .NET scratchpad across many data sources beyond one solution’s DbContext, with a mature GUI and plugins.
Choose SSMS / ADS when…
You are tuning indexes, jobs, and T-SQL on the server — not exploring EF-translated LINQ from C#.
Use together
My EF Vibe for LINQ exploration, SQL visibility, and scan gates in CI; LINQPad for broader scratchpads; SSMS or Azure Data Studio for server-side DBA work.