Zend Guard vs. ionCube [closed]

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I've developped a php script and I want to protect my files, so what do you think is the best choice for doing this.

• ionCube starting from 199$
• Zend Guard 800$

Is there any other cheaper tools or even free ?

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No amount of obfuscation will protect your files. If they are sufficiently popular, someone will decode them and distribute the versions that don't need IonCube or Zend to decode.

DRM won't stop piracy, but it will get in the way of your paying customers. You'll limit your potential customer base to those that can run the loaders to decrypt your software, which is a much smaller pool of people than all people with PHP web hosting. You'll also vastly increase your customer support load as you help people install the loaders and troubleshoot why your software won't run.

Most importantly, by creating this extra work and frustration for customers, and by preventing them from customizing their copies of the script, you'll lower their happiness with your product. That will result in less referrals, less positive reviews on blogs and social media, and in the end, less sales for you.

The best thing you can do to protect your files AND your sales is to not use DRM. Protect your business by offering incentives to be a legitimate customer, like technical support, free minor version upgrades, customer only discussion forums, etc. Not only will these make it desirable to purchase the script from you instead of download it from a pirate without those benefits, but it'll make your customers happier and more likely to spread the word, leading to more customers.

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for both zend and ioncube there are services that decode them, but these softwares latest versions are very expensive to decode like 125 euro for 25 files . this is more than the price of script itself .so you don't need to worry much about it and can easily use either zend or ioncube (I use ioncube).

@dan : I had a script that I was giving free support for life with a very low price and with a lot of features,guess what? somebody stole the code and they spread it all over the internet after that all my customers started calling me about it,kinda were upset that they paid,even though they were getting support... long story short ... trust me encoding your script and forcing people to certain hosts is way way better than your script being shared on internet for free by some dorks. and about not loading on their hosts,I have made a file that test either ioncube is installed on the server or not,and I give this file to them before they buy my script to test it on their server.

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you should encode a part of script, for example core controller can be encoded and leaving the view files this will allow your customers to make minor changes by themselves

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1. It should be possible to properly encode your php & js files, by having all the symbols converted to nonsense symbols, by removing all comments, and by changing filenames. I don't believe that the encryption software in this area is measured by it's cryptographical properties, but rather by it's deployment properties (i.e. 1-click deployment etc.)
   

2. This is something that almost all serious internet companies do. Try "View Source" in GMAIL, and tell me if something there is readable to you.
   

3. @Dan: There are a lot of models to make money, the "software-support" model is only one of them. For example, I would like to set up an internet company, and I don't like the thought that the hosting company can look and copy my source code.

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bcompiler extension is what will help you to encode/decode php files for free, however you'll have to take care of protection/license limitations scheme yourself.