ASP.NET vs PHP – Complete Comparisons

This article was written on the differences between ASP.net vs PHP. It covers time to development, cost, hardware, speed, and much more.

This article was first seen on and republished from perfectwebtutorials.com

These are my analyses, made in 2011, on the issue ASP.NET vs. PHP. If you quarrel with some of the comparisons, you can criticize them, as well.

What is PHP?

PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. PHP is used to be known as short for Personal Home Page but now it’s known as Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is a server-side scripting language for creating dynamic web pages. PHP code is executed on the server-side and the result is sent to your internet browsers, like Chrome or Edge. PHP code can be hosted on every OS/Web server; it can be a Windows server with IIS or Linux with Apache. I would like to point out that there are PHP frameworks, for example, Zend, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, etc. You wonder what frameworks are, and what are the benefits of using them.

Simple demo of hello world in PHP

<?php  Echo "Hello, World!";  ?>

When you request this page, the server process it and returns it to you as HTML.

Hello, World!

What is ASP.NET?

As I wrote for PHP above, ASP.NET is similar. ASP.NET is a web application framework that is made by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic websites or web services. It was first released in January 2002 with version 1.0 of the .NET Framework, and the latest updated version 4.5. ASP.NET supports more programming languages like C#, VB.NET, JScript, etc. ASP.NET frameworks support two models of development, Web-Forms and MVC model.

Simple demo of ASP.NET hello world (WebForms model)

Page: <asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server"></asp:Label>
Code behind:  Label1.Text = "Hello World";

What is a framework?

I put this question because ASP.NET is Web-framework that supports many languages. It means that if we compare ASP.NET and PHP, it would be like this:

• ASP.NET framework with C# language vs. PHP language with Zend framework.
• or C# vs. PHP

“Framework” owns finished classes or classes which are already written and you could use them immediately. For example, how would you do perform certain functions with a framework or without a framework? If we want to place validators on a certain form, where the name and the last name would be obliged:

• Without a framework, we have to write code for the client and server-side, which will verify that validation, by ourselves. (1 hour)
• With a framework, we could make the same, by using the finished validators or just setting them. (5 min).

Example for basic caching in PHP, PHP with Zend framework and ASP.NET

• In PHP, you have to create a class by yourself, which will have to generate your page as HTML, from time to time.
• PHP with Zend framework: You’ll call the cache class, and easily, in a few lines of code, you could create a basic output cache. Example:

<?php // include the class require_once('Zend/Cache.php'); // front end options $frontendOptions = array(    'lifetime' =--> 60
);
 
// backend options
$backendOptions = array(
    'cache_dir' =&gt; 'cache' // Directory where to put the cache files
);
 
// make object
$cache = Zend_Cache::factory('Output',
                             'File',
                             $frontendOptions,
                             $backendOptions);
 
// make an id
$cacheID='user1';
 
// everything before this is not cached
if (!($cache-&gt;start($cacheID))) {
// begin cache
// end cache
$cache-&gt;end();
}
// everything after this is not cached
?>

• For ASP.NET, just add OUTPUT cache, or it would be like this:

OutputCache Duration="100" VaryByParam="none"

Creating a Grid that reads database information.

• PHP without framework: To explain this, I would need a few pages. It will be necessary to make a class for communication with a database, a class for confrontation and screening the information from the database, javascript for paging and sorting. (2-3h)
• PHP with a framework: still too much coding…
• ASP.NET MVC: Less coding than PHP or PHP with a framework but much more time vs. ASP.NET WebForms.

Keep reading this text, because if you stop now, you’ll think that ASP.NET Webforms is an absolute winner.

No, there are too many faults related to it.

Frameworks help the developers to write code in lesser time than usual. There is always the option of writing your framework for your application. However, when you have something like Cake PHP doing a lot of nifty things for you or a Zend that provides great functionality, you can select one depending on your requirements.

Future-proof

Neither of both platforms will disappear soon. These are the platform’s leaders for creating websites. At this moment, Microsoft forces the MVC model.

Basic pros and cons

	ASP.NET	PHP	Comments
Stable Versions	4.5	5.3.8
License	MS EULA	PHP License v3.01
Price	ASP.NET – free OS – Windows – not free Webserver- IIS – included in OS	PHP – free OS- Linux free Webserver- Apache free	PHP can work on any web server and any OS. ASP.NET only works on Windows/IIS. There is an Apache module to be able to make work ASP.NET on Linux .
Hosting Price	Shared hosting – same VPS/Dedicated – little expensive	Shared hosting – same VPS/Dedicated – little cheaper	Check the “Cost” title for more info, why I say that shared hosting is the same price.
Promoted by	Microsoft	PHP Community
Support by owner	Yes	No
Security Fixes	Auto Update – part of OS	Need to update separately when available
Languages	C# VB.NET JScript a lot more	PHP
Database	any	any	Prefered database for ASP.NET is MS-SQL, for PHP is MySQL
Development IDE	Visual Studio MonoDevelop	any ide	You can write PHP code even in Notepad, however, preferred ide is ZendStudio
Easy to learn	yes	yes	From my experience, ASP.NET Web Forms with visual studio is very easy to learn.
Content Management Systems	yes	yes	PHP is the absolute winner here.
Backward Compatibility	Old code will work on new framework versions without change	Old code might need tweaks to make it work on the latest versions	There can be some problems with converting ASP.NET versions, however, those fixes are few and quick compared to PHP.
Security	depends on architecture	depends on architecture	There is no “AUTO” button to make your website secure. It’s all about developer experience…
Performance	Faster	Slower	Check “Performance and Speed” title

Basic SEO overview

When we talk about SEO optimization, my first opinion is that PHP is better. My experience is that HTML output, in the Web forms model for creating websites, has few lines of code more, which is not necessary for the look of the site. First, I would point out those HIDDEN values such as:

• __VIEWSTATE
• __EVENTARGUMENT
• __EVENTVALIDATION
• __EVENTTARGET
• ToolkitScriptManager1_HiddenField

You must wonder how those HIDDEN values affect SEO optimization. I think that Google is extremely smart, so when Google crawls your page, they don’t take into account those kinds of values, for example, a certain text which is about your post. But, on the other hand, you have excess text, and if you consider that one type is one byte, then, according to the size of those HIDDEN values, you may have an expendable text of few KB. Also, you should know that all search engines like Google, when crawling your page, they limit the size of the HTML code, and I think it is 100KB.

For example:

• ASP.NET Webforms model – 100KB text, 5KB hidden values, when google crawls your page, they will index 95KB of your text. 1.1 sec download time
• PHP – 100KB text – when Google index your page, they will crawl 100% of your text. (same page, 1 sec download time)

As you see, two of the same pages, made in PHP and ASP.NET Webforms, have different sizes; accordingly, the PHP page would be faster, when your Internet browser downloads. But, those are small differences and nobody could note them. Here, we can also point out that one of the measures of Google, for better SEO, is the speed of your website.

Ok, there isn’t a big difference?
Well, it’s not exactly like that, till now I spoke about the excess of code in the hidden fields, and now I’ll explain to you all about the excess code of ID’s on HTML tags. When you create a master page in ASP.NET, and you create a Default page which inherited by the master, then, if you put ASP.NET link control with ID=”myID”, this link would be rendered, for example:

• id=” ctl00_myID”, and those are the additional 6 bytes of ID.

Also, SEO URLs in Web forms, by default, look like this:

• www.mysite.com/Default.aspx?id=2?catid=32

It’s much better for you to have SEO URL’s, for example:

• www.mysite.com/new/article/My-Article-Title

If you made this with PHP, the HTML source should look similar like on this image.

I would like to say that the version ASP.NET 3.5 sp1 has the option, ClientIDMode=static, on which you can control the rendering of the ID. Also, you can move all the hidden values to the footer or keep the view state on a server-side. Also, you can change all the links as you want. But, I wouldn’t like to go into details, because this kind of optimization sometimes could be problematic. If those things are important to you, then I recommend you use the ASP.NET MVC model.

I’ll not speak about Web Forms vs. MVC, but the biggest benefit of using the MVC model is that the look of the HTML is under your total control. Here, we don’t have ID fields or Id extensions, or excess code. So, if ASP.NET Web Forms is worse than PHP for SEO optimization, then the ASP.NET MVC model for SEO optimization is absolutely the same as PHP.

Scalability and Ease of Maintenance

Scalability and ease of maintenance have nothing to do with whether you select PHP or ASP.net platform. Web Application scalability and ease of maintenance primarily depend on:

• Programmers’ experience
• Using the best programming practices
• Using a solid programming framework
• Following programming guidelines and standards

Compiled vs interpreted languages

This is also an interesting debate, but, I couldn’t draw a precise conclusion about when we use “compiled code” or which code is faster. But, since Facebook has changed the PHP code in C++, they made “compiled” and, also, spoke out that now they are accelerated, or, they use fewer CPU resources surely, I can say that the “compiled” is faster than the “interpreted” code.

But, on the other hand, if you want to change something in the “complied code”, it has to be compiled again, from the beginning; while in the “interpreted” you can change your code very easily.

First of all, at the very base of the argument, it has to be realized that the two languages are very different. Asp.Net is an optimized and compiled language, meaning the code you enter is reduced to a set of machine-specific instructions before being saved as an executable file. Even if you do not explicitly compile your code before you deploy it, it compiles the first time it is run, then after that, it runs as compiled code.

PHP on the other hand is an interpreted language, meaning it is saved as the code you write and run directly from that code. It is widely accepted and proved many times over that Compiled programs generally run faster than interpreted ones because interpreted programs must be reduced to machine instructions at runtime. Here is a quote from Wikipedia that shows just how much faster they can be:

A program translated by a compiler tends to be much faster than an interpreter executing the same program: even a 10:1 ratio is not uncommon. The mixed solution’s efficiency is typically somewhere in between.

Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiled_language

Conclusion: If you have a website and you change it all the time, or you don’t have too many visitors executing some function, then, the interpreted code is better. On the other hand, if you have many visitors executing many functions, and if you don’t make frequent changes to your code, then, the compiled code is faster. Check my title about PHP vs ASP.NET performance!

Cost

When you read the title, you must imagine that ASP.Net is more expensive than PHP. Let us find out whether it is correct. I’ll pick out three examples:

• Creating a small-medium website, and hosting in the cloud. MOST POPULAR
• Creating a small-medium website, and hosting on a privately owned server.
• Creating a big project, and hosting on a privately owned server.
• I won’t compare these two languages for enterprise solutions for several reasons…

Needful programs & tools for creating a dynamic website:

• IDE
• Database
• OS
• Webserver
• Platform

I must insinuate that in the past, it was more expensive to host an ASP.NET website, on shared hosting, but nowadays, that makes no difference. I’ll take one of the biggest hosting companies for shared hosting, GoDaddy, as an example, where the Linux hosting and the Windows hosting cost equally.

Support and Resources

I must say that ASP.NET is promoted by Microsoft, while PHP is promoted by PHP Community. I must mention that also Microsoft provides you ASP.NET support, BUT that doesn’t mean that ASP.NET has more support(tutorials, how to make, plugins, etc). I talk about this from my own experience, because I have worked with both, PHP and ASP.NET, and on the other hand the numbers show the same. Just enter on Google:

• PHP: 25,270,000,000 results
• ASP.NET: 221,000,000 results
• PHP Tutorial: 223,000,000 results
• ASP.NET Tutorial: 29,800,000 results
• PHP Gallery: 124,000,000 results
• ASP.NET gallery: 25,700,000 results
• PHP cache: 385,000,000 results
• ASP.NET cache: 20,300,000 results
• PHP how to: 1,410,000,000 results
• ASP.NET how to: 200,000,000 results

Time to learn

Many people say that PHP is far easier to learn than ASP.NET, but, I quarrel with this fact. I have 3 years of work experience with PHP, and only one with ASP.NET; so, I can say that at this moment, I’m able to make a better site in ASP.Net than in PHP. I only had a problem at the beginning, till I figure out how ASP.NET works because it is much more different than PHP. But, on the other hand, ASP.NET MVC is very similar to PHP, indeed most PHP frameworks support the MVC model.

MVC is short of
Model – The model is used for database objects that retrieve data from databases.
Controller – manipulating with business logic and database classes before sending information to VIEW.
View – HTML output structure for consumption, what the user interacts with.

Basic example:
Model – I have a database with products that have a name and a price.
Controller – I take all the products from a database which price is higher than 100 dollars.
View – It displays the selected products.

Time to develop and CMS

This is a relative question, but I’ll try to answer it. First, I would like to point out that it’s quite easier to find an open-source PHP CMS than ASP.NET open-source CMS, and, on the other hand, I think that it’s not possible to find such powerful CMS for ASP.NET as that which is for PHP. For example Word Press, which is PHP CMS for creating blogs vs BlogEngine.NET CMS which is for ASP.NET.

So, if we want to make a blog in which we would have categories, posts, gallery, registration with user privileges (to post comments), creating custom pages, then, the absolute winner is PHP CMS. Why?

Compared to Word Press, BlogEngine.NET is relatively immature and has a much smaller community. That’s not to say Blog Engine isn’t good on its own merits, but it’s more niche where Word Press is mainstream. That’s not to say only PHP with CMS for creating blogs is better than ASP.NET for creating blogs, but, it means that creating CMS with PHP, regardless of the fact if it’s intended for blogs, portals, or shopping cart, is faster and have bigger support, tutorials or “how-to” posts.

Google search results for “blogengine.net tutorial” = about 839,000 results

WordPress tutorial: About 89,100,000 results

On the other hand, for example, we need to create a custom website that couldn’t be created with CMS. Then, this type of website could be created much faster, if we use ASP.NET.

Note: When I heard about the Microsoft course for the MVC model for website creation, by using ASP.NET MVC and ADO.NET, I realized that we could make a custom website in a few days. Starting with database scheme, then, business logic and HTML structure.

It could be faster if we use ASP.NET Web Forms because it has the “Fastest development time (RAD)”. For complex charts/reports/grids, you’d have to roll your own with PHP or ASP.NET MVC (or use helpers which someone else has created). But with Web Forms, you have a wealth of server controls (like Telerik).

ASP.NET MVC, model doesn’t have ASP.NET controls, but there are some control templates such as Telerik MVC controls, which can accelerate your time for creating some web applications. Check http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-mvc/grid

Editors and Tools

In this case, the absolute winner is PHP. I seriously think that I haven’t heard about an IDE for ASP.NET except for Visual Studio and Mono, I can say that is easier to find ONLINE ASP.NET IDE than desktop (coderun.com)  . And, if other IDEs exist, I bet that the number isn’t higher than 5. Also, it’s important to mention that those editors work only on Windows, while for PHP, we have a big range of editors: commercial, free, and cross-platform.

I’ll list some PHP editors:
Cross-platform free editors: Eclipse, jEdit, Netbeans IDE
Cross-platform commercial editors : UltraEdit , Zend Studio ,TextMate, phpDesigner

The advantage of Visual Studio is that they have tons of professional add-ons, both commercial and free.
Add-on gallery can be found on the NuGet website.

Platform Independent

I’ll not explain too much about this topic, because PHP is an absolute winner. PHP can work on Windows IIS and on Linux Apache, while ASP.NET can work only on Windows IIS servers. But if you plan to buy shared hosting from a famous company, as I said, there is no difference in the price.

Note: The price for VPS or Dedicate is different, but, for shared hosting is the same.

Note: ASP.NET can work on a Linux Apache server, but what about MS-SQL? 

Which popular sites run on which platforms?

The following table lists the top popular sites, the platform, and the languages they use.

Note: Please don’t confuse C with C# (pronounced C Sharp) — they are completely different programming languages. ASP.net is mostly programmed in C# (C Sharp) or Visual Basic and not C.

Site Up Since Server Platform Programming Language

• Google.com – Linux C, Java, C++, PHP & MySQL, Python for search
• Facebook.com – Linux, PHP, MySQL, and C++
• YouTube.com – Linux, C, Java, and MySQL
• Yahoo.com – Linux, C++, C, Java, PHP & MySQL
• MSN.com – Windows, ASP.net
• Live.com Windows, ASP.net
• stackoverflow.com Windows, ASP.net
• MySpace.com Windows, ASP.net (one of few giants who converted their core technology, from ColdFusion to ASP.NET. I don’t remember where was that post, but I remember that MySpace gain about 50% of server resources reduction with ASP.NET)
• Wikipedia.com Linux, PHP & MySQL
• Amazon.com – Linux, Solaris, C++, Java, J2EE
• WordPress.com – Linux, PHP & MySQL

Stack Overflow software

• Windows Server 2008 R2 x64: Operating System
• SQL Server 2008 R2 running Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64: Database
• Ubuntu Server
• CentOS
• IIS 7.0: Web Server
• HAProxy: for load balancing
• Redis: used as the distributed caching layer.
• CruiseControl.NET: for builds and automated deployment
• Lucene.NET: for search
• Bacula: for backups
• Nagios: (with n2rrd and drraw plugins) for monitoring
• Splunk: for logs
• SQL Monitor: from Red Gate – for SQL Server monitoring
• Bind: for DNS
• Pingdom: an external monitor and alert service.

Stack Overflow hardware

• 10 windows server 2008 r2 (3 za Stack Overflow)
• 2 SQL server 2008 r2

Note: The Stack Overflow group has around 20 servers, 12 of which use Microsoft licenses. I must mention that there are 4 big websites that host on those 20 servers: http://stackexchange.com/, http://stackoverflow.com/, http://superuser.com/, http://serverfault.com/, that’s why I mentioned above that 3 from 10 windows servers are intended for stack3 overflow because they use 2sql server for all the pages. I’ll take one in, in order to calculate them.

So, if you pick up licenses for hosting a site like Stack Overflow, you’ll need around:

3x Win Standard 600$ + 1x SQL standard 2000$ = 3800$.
I’ll add all the other licenses for the software that uses them.
Visual Studio 2010 Team Suite ~3000$
14 total developers or let’s say 4 for Stack Overflow.
4 x VSP ~600$ = 1800$

Total = ~8600$
I think that this is not a big amount if you have a site like Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow has around 16,000,000 unique users per month. So, you can see whether those 8,300 dollars are not too much if they place Google AdSense.  )))))))

NOTE: This calculation can be 50,000 $ if you calculate SQL Enterprise Edition (~20000 $) (if they use Cluster SQL because they have two SQL servers)…..

Flickr

• PHP
• MySQL
• Shards
• Memcached for a caching layer.
• Squid in reverse-proxy for HTML and images.
• Linux (RedHat)
• Smarty for templating
• Perl
• PEAR for XML and Email parsing
• ImageMagick, for image processing
• Java, for the node service
• Apache
• SystemImager for deployment
• Ganglia for distributed system monitoring
• Subcon stores essential system configuration files in a subversion repository for easy deployment to machines in a cluster.
• Cvsup for distributing and updating collections of files across a network.

Performance and Speed

Maybe, this is the most interesting comparison between PHP and ASP.NET. Generally, you can find on the Internet that PHP is faster than ASP.NET or the opposite. I’ll test both, and I’ll give to you the source code of both scripts if you want to test them by yourself.

I made two functions: If-Else and Loops.

Configuration:
TEST1:
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate
CPU: Intel P7570
RAM: 3GB
ASP.NET C# WebForms 4.0
IIS 7.5 – default settings
Apache 2.2.21 – default settings
PHP 5.3.8 – default settings

TEST2 (just for PHP)
VPS 1 core Xeon E5520
2GB ram
Centos
Apache 2.2.16
Php : 5.2.14

Results:

TEST1
PHP If-Else: 6.438997 seconds
ASP.NET If-Else: 0.1020059 seconds
PHP loops: 5 seconds and 213732 milliseconds
ASP.NET loops: 0.0680039

TEST2(even with Xeon)
PHP If-Else: 2.367657
PHP loops: 2.717072

ASP.NET is much faster than PHP, numbers prove that!

If you think about Facebook, please understand that:

1. It uses a re-written PHP and
2. Transformer+compiler called HipHop which transforms PHP code to highly optimized C++ code and then compiles with gcc. We are talking here about the PHP we get for application developers from php.net.

Update Tips

1. Creating multi-language sites is much easier in ASP.NET.
2. It is much easier to find free PHP hosting (for testing or similar), even with no ads!

Comments

Recommended Articles

• How to Create a jQuery Ajax Contact Form in PHP
• Creating a Basic Web Form with CSS in minutes!
• How to Create a CSS Button With CSS Animation