Which is better? Qt Creator or Visual Studio IDE

If you're only working on Windows I'd say it boils down to preference. Otherwise, the clear advantage Qt Creator has over VS is that it's cross platform and moving platforms while keeping your IDE is a clean winner.

If you only work on Windows and have experience working with VS, then you might be more comfortable using something you already know.

Obviously Qt Creator is a lot more Qt-oriented. Every common operation while developing with Qt is bound to be easier in Qt Creator since it's primary goal was to be a tool for developing Qt applications.

Even debugging, which puts VS on top of others, is becoming argumentative when comparing it to Qt Creator, since recently almost every Qt class has a customized debugging representation (read more here).

I am using QtCreator for development of my Qt applications because I it better fits the Qt classes as such. However I use Visual Studio for Debugging those projects.

Qt-Creator:

• better Qt object support (help, navigation, etc.)
• better GUI editor
• some nice features like mouse navigation
• really fast IDE
• poor debugging (at least I don't know how to efficiently use it here) compared to VS

Visual Studio (+Visual Assist):

• great debugger
• Visual Assist
• easier project file configuration and customization (qmake is way too limited in some areas)
• Visual Studio is my choice for C++ development (I'm used to it)
• Qt integration is not that good (IMHO)