ZendGuard vs IonCube
 

Was looking into getting Zend Guard and then saw that it is $600 PER YEAR. That's seems a bit pricey. What do you guys think about the different products out there. I know that zend optimizer has a wider distribution base but it just seems a bit ludicrous. Will IonCube work just as well or will it be hard to get people to install the server component for it as well?

Ioncube installation takes 3minutes (most of the time it is already installed though).
Not to mention that many "de-zender" applications are available everywhere allowing you to decode zend encoded files (and they do work pretty well).
One of the cool ioncube feature is the "ASCII encoding" so your customers don't even have to configure their ftp client to upload in binary format (and believe me that drastically reduce the number of technical support tickets about installation issues!) :2 cents:

There is also another alternative called "Nu-coder", but this is a pretty new encoder and there is a very high change that you will have to install it manually for all your customers
http://www.nusphere.com/products/nucoder.htm :upsidedow

zend is the best, but ioncube works fine a welll, more coders are using ioncube because of the price factor

Zend myself. If you have a product, it's worth the money.

Just a note on the dezending. Only the previous version of ZendGuard was decodeable. The new one was a complete rewrite and no one seems to of hacked it yet.

Zend is a laugh. Sourceguardian is my number 1 choice, followed by Ioncube.

Zend Guard is JUNK. I wasted my money on it and it fucking pisses me off.

IonCube all the way.
That with licensing of PhpAudit or Iono.

Ioncude can be decoded too.

Ioncube installation takes more tham 3 minutes.

By the very nature of the way these types of encoders work they can all be decoded. The difficulty in which they make it to be decoded should be how it is judged which the latest Zend would be on top but that is just right now, that will change.

Ioncube is the cheaper alternative and is pretty much supported across the board now, even if dl() is not available chances are it's already loaded into the php distribution for most hosts.

So given that I personally would choose ioncube for a sheer price point factor. Ultimately both zend and ioncube are going to do the same thing at the end of the day.

- Upload the loader to your server (15sec)
- Add 1 line to your php.ini (30sec)
- Restart apache (5sec)

If your server admin needs more than 3 minutes to install it, then it would be wise to fire him :1orglaugh