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I know the main three are Zend Guard, ionCube Encoder, and Source Guardian, but there are most certainly others out there as well.
Post your experiences with the ones that you've used (either from a developer standpoint using these to encode scripts, or a user standpoint running scripts encoded via them). Noting things like ease-of-use, customer support, speed, pros, cons, etc. would be great for people who are interested in either encoding their own scripts or choosing which version of an encoded script to grab for their server.
I'll start: I'm currently using the ionCube encoder version 6.5 pro to encode some scripts I'm going to be selling once I get my online store working. So far, it works just fine from a developer perspective -- you can set custom properties on your license files, as well as generate licenses from a script via the make_license script provided with the pro encoder. You can even encrypt non-php files if you so choose, which can be decrypted via the ionCube loader api, which seems to only work inside of encoded scripts. My main gripes about ionCube is the seemingly elementary license support. While you can set custom properties when generating the license, there is no way to allow certain properties in the license to be modified (such as the last time the script dialed home or whether the license has been activated or not), requiring you to instead re-download the license file each time you change a property or use some other mechanism to store mutable data. In addition, it seems to me like it's a bit on the slow side when it comes to encoding files, and it has no support for php 5.3-specific items, such as namespaces (they're promising php 5.3 support in the upcoming 7.0 release, but they have yet to actually specify a date for this release, despite having been asked to give an estimate timeframe at least 20 times on their forums). That said, I've searched around and have yet to find any site that can break files encoded with ionCube 6.5, so it seems to be pretty secure. The few sites I did find that claimed to be able to break these files turned out to be scams, when I tested them by sending an encoded file that I made, and the code segment they sent back to "prove" that they could break it was actually nowhere in the file that I sent.
So, you can post reviews like I did above, and feel free to intelligently discuss preferences as well (but no flaming, please)
Post your experiences with the ones that you've used (either from a developer standpoint using these to encode scripts, or a user standpoint running scripts encoded via them). Noting things like ease-of-use, customer support, speed, pros, cons, etc. would be great for people who are interested in either encoding their own scripts or choosing which version of an encoded script to grab for their server.
I'll start: I'm currently using the ionCube encoder version 6.5 pro to encode some scripts I'm going to be selling once I get my online store working. So far, it works just fine from a developer perspective -- you can set custom properties on your license files, as well as generate licenses from a script via the make_license script provided with the pro encoder. You can even encrypt non-php files if you so choose, which can be decrypted via the ionCube loader api, which seems to only work inside of encoded scripts. My main gripes about ionCube is the seemingly elementary license support. While you can set custom properties when generating the license, there is no way to allow certain properties in the license to be modified (such as the last time the script dialed home or whether the license has been activated or not), requiring you to instead re-download the license file each time you change a property or use some other mechanism to store mutable data. In addition, it seems to me like it's a bit on the slow side when it comes to encoding files, and it has no support for php 5.3-specific items, such as namespaces (they're promising php 5.3 support in the upcoming 7.0 release, but they have yet to actually specify a date for this release, despite having been asked to give an estimate timeframe at least 20 times on their forums). That said, I've searched around and have yet to find any site that can break files encoded with ionCube 6.5, so it seems to be pretty secure. The few sites I did find that claimed to be able to break these files turned out to be scams, when I tested them by sending an encoded file that I made, and the code segment they sent back to "prove" that they could break it was actually nowhere in the file that I sent.
So, you can post reviews like I did above, and feel free to intelligently discuss preferences as well (but no flaming, please)