I've started doing test automation for my employer with Visual studio express but very soon realized that it does not have good plugin support. Now i'm planning to move away from it and after reading about Community version I think this is the best option to go.
However, I'm not really sure on the licensing terms, it does say that I can't use it for commercial purposes but I'm just doing test automation for my employer which I'm sure will not be sold, does it still gets counted as commercial development ? If not then can I use Visual studio Community version ?
From the website:
An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.
For all other usage scenarios:
In non-enterprise organizations, up to five users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or >$1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.
So you're allowed to use it in an enterprise if you're contributing to open source, research or teaching; or are a company with less than 250 PCs and under $1,000,000 in revenue and there are fewer than 5 users working with it