What is the difference between ASP and PHP?

What is the difference between ASP and PHP?

First off, what are they?

ASP was Microsoft's first server-side script engine for dynamically-generated web pages. It has now been superseded by ASP.NET. Web pages with the .asp file extension use ASP. Pages with the .aspx extension are ASP.NET and compiled, which makes them faster and more robust than server-side scripting in ASP which is interpreted at run-time. Such marked differences between ASP and ASP.NET have led to the terms Classic ASP or ASP Classic being used.

PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor and is a widely used general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. It can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system platform free of charge.

Here are some fact about both and you can come to the conclusion the fits best for you.

PHP is well documented.
PHP has MySQL functions.
PHP can be run for practical, everyday use via command line.
PHP runs well with Apache.
PHP code is similar to Perl, which some feel is easier to read than asp/Visual Basic.
PHP web hosting services are less expensive.

ASP is also well documented.
ASP has factories for almost all ASP SQL server web hosting.
ASP can run via command line, but there is no need for that since it works almost by itself.
ASP runs with IIS.
ASP you can code in so much languages, C, C#, VB#, and lots more...
ASP is more supported, but you have to pay.
Bugfixes comes faster for ASP

Bottom line:

PHP is free and broadly cross-platform. It can be installed and used on any type of server.  ASP.net is Microsoft-specific and pretty expensive. ASP.net is somewhat faster than PHP and works particularly well with Windows clients.

Hope that helped.