XMLSpy alternatives...

[Noodnik]

I'm looking at XML/XSD editors to help me to put together a fairly large set of interlinked schemas. I've tried XMLSpy and like it very much. But... It's SOOO expensive!!! (almost $1000 for the version I think I need!). Are there ANY alternatives I should try that even come close to being as easy to use and as intuitive as XMLSpy? I've tried XMLFox (freeware) and Popkin's "XML Architect" - they don't even come close as far as I'm concerned. Anything else out there? Again, I need it to be stable, be able to edit large linked schemas and validate documents based on the linked schemas.

[Brian van der Beek]

XMLSpy is just the best and the home edition only cost about 40/50 dollars.

[Michael A Barnhart]

Personal opinion of course but I have liked Stylus Studio better than XMLSpy. It is still not cheap though, I believe the price is about $500USD. Another alternative for schema editing only is Tibco's XML Authority. I am not sure if it is still available by it self though, The suite was back to the $500 range. I have used "Cooktop" for transformation file editing. I would think you could do some schema editing with it but it may not be that different than notepad for just schema's.

[Steven Campbell]

You could wait for the next version of Visual Studio .NET - apparently XML support is vastly improved. (I cannot recall where I heard that exactly).