Newly released on Vince B’s blog, BlueDragon.net 7 pricing. For a long time, the Blue Dragon product had the reputation as being the “Cheaper” cousin of ColdFusion, but no longer.
I don’t currently have pricing for Scorpio in front of me, but it seems as if BlueDragon now has the reputation for being the “More Expensive” cousin of ColdFusion.
I, for one, appreciate New Atlanta in the CFML engine marketplace. The competition has been good for the state of the art, if perhaps not for the profits of Adobe nee Macromedia. New Atlanta has several ‘firsts’, one being cfthread, another being cfinterface.
With that said, the last time I had a decision about which CFML engine to use, I went with ColdFusion Enterprise. I felt the price justified the expense because ColdFusion is the Gold Standard for CFML engines and CF Enterprise and BD enterprise are priced equal. I specifically avoided using the BlueDragon product line because of certain incompatibilities with popular CF Frameworks. Even at a lower costs, the issues and limitations were too much of a negative.
I understand some CFFrameworks vs. BlueDragon issues are resolved. In fact, Peter Farrell announced on a recent cfweekly podcast that he was able to use MachII 1.5 and the ColdSpring BER on top of BlueDragon.
Still, one has to wonder if the 2k entry price for BD Standard is on the mark. It is certainly ~800 more than CF Standard. Of course, I am a lowly programmer and I don’t have bastions of Market Research professionals scouring the market with surveys and the like. Nor do I have years of experience developing boxed commercial software like Vince B. and co. ( If you don’t already know, Vince has been behind some very successful and innovative products in his time.)
Will there still be a ‘free’ BlueDragon product? Will hosting companies provide BlueDragon on their CFML hosting plans? Will Adobe counter will a Hosting Specific version allowing cheaper hosting prices? Stay Tuned to the War of the CFML engines…..
Update 1: The reporting above is slanted and inaccurate, like most of my postings. There are some good comments below adding balance. My biggest error was in failing to differentiate between BlueDragon.Net, and the other products in the New Atlanta Stable. Have a look at the Product Matrix. Also Vince B. states “Finally, yes, there will continue to be a free BlueDragon edition–we have no plans to change this. Pricing of the Java-based editions in the BlueDragon Product line remain unchanged.” I did not know this and it is certainly good news for the many using BD. Have a read through the comments for a more balanced perspective.