Quote:
Originally Posted by PBucksJohn
You're going to get less and pay much more in the long run going the custom route.
You have to hope that the person who wrote it doesn't disappear and is available long term to make modifications, fixes, feature additions, and provide general support for the product. The last thing you want to do to a programmer is hand them someone else's code to work on. They hate it  Either way this will get costly after a while.
Also, you have more issues to worry about as security goes with one person using the solution as opposed to many people using the solution.
With CARMA you are not stuck to a certain flow which does happen with some solutions as was indicated above. |
1) Absolutely in the long run you end up with so many more features but depending on your needs you may find 90% of those are of no use to you.
2) Absolutely true if you hand a codebase to another programmer odds are they'll hate it. I'm just finishing up re-writing a CMS for a guy because some czech idiot did things insanely poorly and the script was using triple the resources that it should have. BUT if you go with a REAL programmer they'll still be around in a couple years when you're ready for upgrades. From what I've read about Brandon he's building up a solid rep.
3) As for security issues as long as the programmer is aware of all the common exploits a custom solution is MORE secure in the exact same way a mac is more secure than windows. If there's only 1 person using it nobody will bother spending the time to exploit it.
What it all comes down to is look over the demo's and if that 3-4k is going to be be exactly what you need out of the box simply go for it! If nothing seems to fit then in that price range you really do have some options for some custom solutions.