php vs asp.net performance & comparison [Infographic]

September 21st, 2023

Open source PHP and Microsoft’s proprietary ASP.NET have been at war from the time of launching of ASP.NET in 2002. Both of these are used to build dynamic web pages and web applications programming. ASP.NET is the successor of Microsoft’s Active server pages (ASP) which has been revamped and recoded in .NET framework to facilitate web development through an event-driven GUI model rather than the web-scripting environment offered by PHP and ASP. It does sound a little confusing and appears to indicate that the ASP.NET and PHP are very different, but in actuality there is not very huge difference between PHP and ASP.NET.

But when you get down to perform a PHP vs. ASP.NET through testing performance analysis, there are some difference visible between the two. So here we try to highlight some of the main differences apparent to us when doing a PHP vs. ASP.NET comparison.

Development and Installation Costs

Now the first and the most important aspect that we faced in a PHP vs. ASP.NET comparison is in cost of operation and installation. ASP.NET is Microsoft’s proprietary software platform. Even though software such as, Visual Studio and .NET framework, that are required to build ASP.NET pages are free, they can only be used with Windows IIS server software which is not free. It comes with Windows operating systems and requires additional licenses if you have to use additional servers. The net cost can become quite high as compared to PHP which is open source, and thus free, and can run on Linux based server systems, which are also open source and free. Additionally PHP is platform independent, i.e., it can run on any platform such as Windows, Linux, Unix, or Mac OS X.

However ASP.NET uses Rapid-Application-Development Model that results in faster page development and thus low development costs. Also ASP.NET is better for building large scale web architectures that are required by corporate and thus could pay back its usage costs. However when doing a PHP vs. ASP.NET for a personal or small scale web development, PHP gains a upper hand.

Deployment

Even though ASP.NET is faster to develop, it comprises of complex coding that requires longer compilation and deployment times as compared to PHP. Therefore even though both PHP and ASP.NET pages are executed on server side, the next thing that is visible on a PHP vs. ASP.NET comparison is that it takes larger time to deploy, execute and render heavy ASP.NET pages as compared to PHP pages, especially when the traffic on the server is large.

Support and additional resources

The other important difference visible in PHP vs. ASP.NET comparison is in the field of support and additional resources. ASP.NET is developed by Microsoft; thus it employs dedicated engineers who are working on planned improvement and development of the language. Also dedicated development results in fewer bugs and problems, and once found, they can be easily rectified. In addition to it, Microsoft has a large customer support base which is dedicated for trouble shooting issues related to ASP.NET.

PHP on the other hand is open source and is developed with the help of a large community. Thus it is difficult to achieve a planned development. Development process is a little faster for PHP but since the developers are placed globally and it is not possible to get a dedicated large scale team for development, the net product always has a more number of bugs than ASP.NET. But the Beta release process ensures that stable versions are bug free, and a huge testing community means that bugs are found sooner.

Even though there is no dedicated customer support for PHP, the developer community is very huge and helpful. You can clear your problems through numerous forums and open source developers, but it is a lengthy and tiring process.

Along with those benefits more open source platforms, such as PHP, have more developers working on it than proprietary software. This results in more number of plugins and other third party applications that could be utilized for your web page. So PHP has a battery of available application to facilitate page development.

Popularity

But in the end when doing a PHP vs. ASP.NET, it all comes down to popularity. LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) softwares and platforms are hugely popular. Nearly every large scale non-Microsoft website such as Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, WordPress, twitter and Facebook, to name a few, are all running on Linux based servers employing PHP, JavaScript, Java, and C. Costs of windows server are a huge deterrent in teaching and learning ASP.NET. This results in lower popularity of the language and a lower presence on the net, resulting in a biased reluctance. Even though ASP.NET is more flexible, secure, and is more robust that PHP, this biased reluctance is the main reason of its unpopularity in large number of websites.

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