Hello everyone, I want to have a project developed similar to the PCPartPicker Website. Various technologies were proposed to me, like WordPress, Laravel, ASP.NET, etc.
Since I don't have the knowledge to evaluate this choice correctly, and since it is fundamental to the success of the project, I wanted to know the community's opinion on the matter.
Obviously, the developers promote the one they know best or which suits them best, so I would need an 'independent' opinion about which one you think would be the best option possibly also considering development costs.
Thank you for your help.
Being a Laravel dev (I've used ASP.net too), I would hands-down recommend Laravel. It's convenient to build on, easy to deploy, and there are plenty of skilled Laravel engineers in almost every country. So if you ever want to bring development 'in-house' or work intermittently with freelancers after you've finished with the agency you're working with, you'll find that quite easy wherever you are.
As has been mentioned, Laravel is very ergonomic for developers and it has an incredible community (mostly filled with really positive people) and ecosystem (lots of ready-to-use open source packages to augment your application with new features).
Development costs for the two I'd expect to be about the same, but possibly the agencies using .net will charge a little more as it has historically commanded a slightly higher price point, but I'm not sure how true that still is.
Both will get the job done perfectly well. Laravel would be my choice.
OK I see, thank you for your advices, from the outside is very difficult to understand which direction to go. But at least now I know that I am not wrong in either case.
Thanks
I love .NET, and have a bit of experience in Laravel (nothing in production though). I would recommend sticking to Laravel for a project like the one you want to do. It is loved by developers for its elegancy and features. Laravel has incredible ecosystem with many packages available to implement features fast and easy. The development cost will be much less than .NET (PHP developers are cheap).
What about maintenance? It is a different story. PHP doesn't scale as well as other technologies, but it will have no problem handling traffic for a website like that.
>PHP doesn't scale as well as other technologies
PHP is used by Facebook and Wikipedia, which represent a significant proportion of internet traffic. I think it scales just fine. Laravel on top of PHP will be slower, but you should only worry about scale when scale is your problem. There will likely be a lot more interesting problems to solve before scale becomes an issue.
Thank you for your suggestion, I will take it into account. Are there possibly other technologies to consider besides the two mentioned?
Oh yes.. There are almost infinite number of possible tech stack you can choose from. Remember that there will be downsides to all technologies though.
I would recommend looking into React or Svelte for front-end development.
React is more mature and established in the development community. It won't be a problem to find experienced developers.
Svelte is a relatively new one, but is growing fast.
There are a few options for the server side too.
JavaScript and TypeScript have Node.js which is a great tool for creating asynchronous APIs that scale well. It is also easy to find developers that can handle both front-end and server side of you project.
Golang is a new "cool" guy on the block. It is fast and secure, but it's harder too find developers and they cost more.
Python is a great choice for a quick prototype with Flask or Django, but is harder to scale than Golang or Node.
It is hard to recommend something without understanding the set of features that you're aiming for. What UI & UX design will look like? Is it gonna be reactive and highly interactive? What type of user system do you have in mind? How much data do you want to collect? What do you want to do with that data afterwards? Do you have plans for real-time interactions between clients and servers (chat system for example)? Those are only high level question that come to mind right now, but they greatly affect the architecture of the whole project. I can assure you there will be many decisions that you will have to make that will affect the development process.
OK thank you very much, I will try to understand better the technologies you mentioned.
Thanks