Django vs ASP.NET MVC vs PHP frameworks - cost

Question

How much more expensive is it to work with ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC ? Can you give me some average price comparisons for servers ? And what about the software solutions ?

Answer 1

Well, I have to work in all three. The big cost for ASP.MVC is tooling (Visual Studio, Windows, Etc.). Productivity isn't super amazing, but due to the rigid structure you do end-up with a quality scalable product.

Django and PHP can be developed using free opensource tools (ASP has Mono on Unix but ASP.NET needs VS unless you're an expert). Hosting is pretty cheap and community support is ready for action. Django is very, very fast to develop applications with, mainly because Python is such a beautiful language. Django is always my first choice if I want to reduce timescales and drop a healthy profit.

PHP has a host of projects out there to help you get up and running quickly (Zend, CakePHP, Symfony, Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress) so you could pluck something off the shelf to help you get it off the ground in a reasonable amount of time.

As for cost overall if you have VS already, not much between them and I don't think someone could give you a ballpark figure without a full project definition I'm afraid.

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

The interesting topic is "a cost of open source". Open-source frameworks come with no warranty and if you need to do training it costs thousands. Without a commercial vendor and a reasonable pricing structure there is high chance that framework will eventually become less competitive.

I'll give example. Zend2, CI2 have been pushed by a companies which benefit monetarily from the framework. In case of Zend, it promotes their platform. CI founders sell sources, trading, code reviews etc.

There are also dual-licensed frameworks, such as Vork, ExtJS, and the one I contribute to - Agile Toolkit . Models are different there but generally companies invest license costs directly into framework improvement and R&D. Frameworks maintained by community often can't do that and would only play "catch" with commercial alternatives. If you don't agree, compare jQuery UI with ExtJS, which one is more polished? Myself being a strong fan of jQuery UI I still recognize that lack of dedication makes it difficult to have a strong platform.

There are only few PHP commercial frameworks due to the open-source nature of the platform. I see that as a bad thing. Diversity and choice for people motivated by efficiency and profit is important.

I should stop here or I'll be eaten alive by open-source fanboys :)