PHP vs .NET: An Exhaustive Comparison Between Two Popular Options for Web Developers

Market Share

Let us begin our discussion by focusing on the market share of PHP and asp.net.

As per the statistics received up to March 2017, the market share of PHP as a web development language stands at 57% in contrast to asp.net which holds 34% market share.

Performance and Speed

Let us clear a common misconception by saying that the website performance doesn’t differ much based on whether you have built the site with PHP or asp.net. To explain this let us take a common scenario. For completing any particular task where the web app needs to process a query to the database and deliver the output through the web server to the user’s browser, a programming language is responsible for communicating with the database and the web servers. In such cases, both PHP and asp.net stands absolutely equal as both can easily access database file systems and deliver the queries to the web server.

The real difference in performance actually depends on several factors including the database server performance, the bandwidth, the browser and also the device through which the web is being accessed.

When you compare the capabilities in accessing the file system, both PHP and asp.net hardly have any differences. But accessibility really becomes better when the server operating system is Linux with ext4 file system instead of Windows OS and NTFS file system.

There is another performance boost with certain server OS systems. For example,
server operating systems like Linux are very lean with least burden of GUI elements and consequently, they actually use the system CPU and random memory much less. This allows more allocation of random memory and CPU power to the database and web server.

There are other aspects that can have a toll on the performance of a web app including the programming expertise in writing the code and expertise to write proper SQL queries. The coding expertise with both PHP and asp.net is crucial to delivering the optimum performance. Only there are few functionalities that work better either with PHP or with asp.net.

So as for performance and website speed, both the PHP and asp.net stands very equally in all regular situations except a very few functions. Apart from that, server OS, file systems, bandwidth and programming expertise make a lot of difference in ensuring performance in most cases.

Cost of Development

When it comes to server and development cost, there are significant differences. PHP comes as absolutely free and Linux, MySQL server, PostgreSQL server and Apache server also comes as free along with their subsequent upgrades. In addition to that, you don’t need to bear any extra cost for the additional server to work as the backup or for running several servers for clustering or load distributing purposes.

The configuration referred as LAMP comprising Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP enjoys uncontested popularity among hosting companies as they incur a very low hosting cost to the users in comparison to the Windows hosting with asp.net as the active web development framework.

ASP.net comes as free with Windows OS. But for Microsoft server, there is considerable cost of licensing. Apart from the licensing cost for Microsoft Windows Server the Microsoft SQL Server also comes with a high licensing fee. All the future upgrades of these platforms and databases also incur cost on a regular basis. The particular price stands respectively at $1029 for Microsoft Server 2008 R2 Standard 64-bit and $1038 for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition. For Small Business cost approximately. Both these options are for small businesses and for large enterprise IT systems the cost goes considerably higher than this.

The above licensing costs for Microsoft can substantially increase if the site becomes popular and there is a need to run the site on multiple servers or requires server features such as load balancing, server clustering or hot standby.

Community Support

Thanks to the global popularity of PHP as the dominant web development language it boasts of a huge community of developers. In plain consideration, PHP community is obviously a lot bigger than the asp.net community.

But since all PHP developers do not have the same type of expertise and experience with every PHP framework, even within PHP developers finding experts of your required framework can often be a challenge. On the other hand, asp.net which is a completely self-reliable framework enjoys a very consistent and organic support of all asp.net developers. Unlike building a multitude of PHP frameworks by developers, asp.net fully relies on the MVC and WebAPI protocol to remain self-sufficient.

PHP: Pros and Cons

Every Programming language and framework has an equal share of pros and cons. Let us have a look at the key pros and cons of both PHP and asp.net.

ASP.NET: Pros and Cons

Asp.net has its equal share of pros and cons, distinct advantages and disadvantages. Let us have a look at them.