Serious question:
What advantages does Adobe Coldfusion offer over Lucee? Obviously one instance of ACF costs thousands of dollars, while Lucee is free. Security, features, performance, installing, etc ?
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Adobe ColdFusion offers several advantages over Lucee, including enterprise support, a secure platform, a wide range of features, high performance, and relatively easy installation. There are also disadvantages to consider, such as the cost of licensing, a complex licensing system, and a smaller community compared to Lucee. The best platform choice depends on specific needs and preferences, with ColdFusion being suitable for those requiring robust support and advanced features, while Lucee may be more appealing for those seeking a free platform with a larger community.
Puja, on what basis do you assert that Lucee has a larger community? You said it twice I suspect cf has a far larger user base (in terms of number of installs, number of shops, number of developers). Even the “state of the cf union” survey suggests that–though it only represents those who took the time to fill it out.
Is the Lucee community more VOCAL? Perhaps. More active? That’s debatable. As I said in my first answer here a couple years ago, there are multiple communities. Someone only in one of them could think its dominant, or that what they see there is representative. I list the multiple communities here: cf411.com/cfcommhelp
I work for government and ColdFusion is an approval application server. I want to use Coldbox MVC. Is there any way that I only install the MVC framework from Coldbox to work with CF without installing Lucee?
Lan, yes. Coldbox is not tied to Lucee. It’s perhaps most often shown using Commandbox, which uses Lucee by default, but you can use its engine argument to start an Adobe CF instance.
One of the first reasons to use ACF over Lucee in my mind is that by purchasing and using ACF you’re giving Adobe a reason to continue to produce and support it. I don’t think this is insignificant. While many open source projects have never and will never have a commercial counterpart like CF does, I think the continued existence of ACF and Lucee is a symbiotic relationship and the disappearance of either would negatively impact the other.
Serious (and simplest) answer: there is no catalog of all the differences between CF and Lucee, let alone the “advantages” of CF over Lucee like you seek.
There is none even comparing where they are the same nor any that lists all the ways they differ, let alone what’s in one that’s not in the other. There is none from the Lucee developers or community (or what there is is either dated or surprisingly spartan), and there will likely never be one from the Adobe. Perhaps someone may someday put in the energy to do a complete (or even moderately complete) comparison, and hopefully it would be from an independent perspective.
That said, rather than leave you with that simple answer alone, I will share some more for consideration (and others may chime in and/or offer counterpoints).
Whenever I’m asked this question, I start by offering the same that I do when asked to compare CF server monitors, such as FusionReactor and the PMT (new in CF2018): they both do things that the other does, and each does things that the other does not. And as with selecting among monitors (the free PMT and the commercial FR), I tell people that they need to assess the differences that matter for them.
That will be far faster than waiting for any single assessment of all the differences, if that may ever come (as much as I would like to do that comparing both monitors and both CFML engines).
Of course, for many, the simple answer will be “Lucee is free, so I will use that”. But as others have pointed out (and about other open source software), there’s far more to using a product than its purchase price. There are of course migration efforts (which granted, one can have in moving to a new CF version), but there are installation and deployment differences (which need to be born not just for ops folks but also developers).
And of course, you’re asking here on the Adobe CF portal, which may skew the responses some.
Finally (and again without addressing the “advantages”, I would at least want to address your observation that CF “costs thousands of dollars”. That’s not entirely true: for one thing, if one upgrades from the latest CF version to the new one, the upgrade cost is half the full license purchase price ($1249 to upgrade from CF2018 to 2021, for example). (And of course there is the free Developer edition, but I realize you’re talking about the cost of running CF in production. Still, some don’t realize you don’t NEED to pay Adobe a dime to “run” CF in development.)
Perhaps as important: some people don’t “buy a CF license” at all, even for production: they run it on a hosted service, where the license is purchased by the hosting company, and customers using CF get the license included in their hosting fee (which can be as little as around $100 even for a VPS). Then also there’s the Adobe AMI (Amazon Machine Image), where again one does not pay for a perpetual CF license but instead an hourly price, which is for CF Enterprise.
Again, I realize you were focused on the “advantages” of CF over Lucee. I will leave that for others to start mentioning. That said, if you look at any of the various Adobe resources on what’s new in CF2021, 2018, 2016, and so on, you will often find that things are added to CF that Lucee either doesn’t ever add, or only eventually adds. They are making the call often on what they perceive to be “worthwhile” for the majority of their users. You can make that same assessment, as you see such features discussed (to decide if enough of those newer features warrant considering them).
And I will add that in my “hidden gems in CF” talks I often also talk about what may be “new in CF” that is not necessarily readily found in resources from Adobe talking about “what’s new”.
Still, I don’t mean to make this sound like I’m purely an ACF-fan-boy. It’s simply that I spend most of my day helping people who use CF (and more than 90% of the folks who come to me for help are ACF rather than Lucee users–whatever that may mean, and I grant that people moving to Lucee are often self-starters, prepared to “go it alone” as another aspect of avoiding costs.)
Finally, there’s of course an active community for both, for Lucee (dev.lucee.org) and for CF (this CF portal and the Adobe CF community forums), and people certainly get much of their help in those places rather than from individuals or consultants. And those other couple of places would be a place to ask your question if you find you don’t get much other response here.
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