Visual Builder and Visual Builder Studio: What's the Difference?

Although there is some overlap between Oracle Visual Builder and Oracle Visual Builder Studio, they are in fact two distinct Cloud offerings with different capabilities.

Here's a brief overview of the similarities and differences:

Visual Builder

Visual Builder Studio (VB Studio)

Do I need a license?

Yes, Visual Builder requires a license, based on the number of OCPUs that you provision.

If you have already purchased an Oracle Cloud subscription, VB Studio is a free entitlement for you. Oracle developers use VB Studio to build Oracle Cloud Applications, which is the same tool you use to customize and extend those apps. For that reason, VB Studio is provisioned as part of every Oracle Fusion Cloud Apps tenancy.

What comes with it?

Along with an integrated editor called the Designer, Visual Builder comes with a web/app server, a database, a proxy for authenticating and calling REST services, and integration with Oracle's identity service for authentication.

VB Studio is a platform for teams to manage their development process and source code, as well as to automate CI/CD. VB Studio includes Git, CI/CD pipeline, issue tracking, development dashboards, wiki, and more. It also comes with the integrated editor, the Designer, to build both responsive apps and App UIs.

What was the former name?

Visual Builder used to be known as "Visual Builder Cloud Service (VBCS), and is sometimes referred to as "VB standalone".

VB Studio's DevOps capabilities used to be packaged separately and were known by the name "Developer Cloud Service (DevCS)".

What can I build?

Using the Designer, you can build visual applications (also called responsive applications), then deploy or "host" them on the Visual Builder instance itself.

With VB Studio, you can build:

Visual applications (also called responsive applications), which are then deployed to a Visual Builder instance, purchased separately. Unlike Visual Builder, VB Studio is not a hosting platform.
Extensions (containing App UIs or other resources) to customize or add new capabilities to Oracle Cloud Applications, which are then deployed to an Oracle Cloud Application instance.
Bespoke applications using the programming language of your choice, which are then deployed to Oracle Cloud.

You may also be wondering what the difference is between visual applications and extensions:

Visual applications function as standalone apps that are accessible from anywhere, with their own security implementation. They can use different look and feel schemas, have their own custom domain names, and use their own database for storing data in custom objects.
Extensions are created as additional pages in your Oracle Cloud Application instance. They are an integral part of the UI experience (not iFramed), appear in the Oracle Cloud Application menus, and leverage the same users and roles for authentication and authorization. Extensions are only accessible by Oracle Cloud Applications users and have the same look and feel as the rest of Oracle Cloud Applications.

While both types of apps can integrate data from external REST services, they differ in the authentication types and connection topologies that are supported out of the box. Notably, visual apps can support proxy-based flows and avoid CORS issues for external REST services, and also support more authentications. For more information, see the authentication topic in the documentation for Visual Builder and the topic in AppUI.