What is the difference between Photon Server and Photon Cloud?

Question

What is the difference between the Photon Server and Photon Cloud products?

Answer 1

From https://doc.photonengine.com/en-us/server/current/getting-started/onpremises-or-saas

Photon Server vs. Photon Cloud

Photon Server is a On Premise (OnPrem) server application that you can run and host on machines of your choice. Fully customizable and the authoritative control gives you the freedom to configure and set up your own infrastructure for multiplayer enabled applications.

Photon Cloud is a Software as a Service (SaaS) and as such a fully managed service. You can completely concentrate on your application client while hosting, server operations and scaling is all taken care of in the Photon Cloud.

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Server Administration.

Photon Cloud

Zero server hassle anymore. Sit back and relax while our experts take care of running the servers.

Photon Server

You gain full authority of running Photon for your applications. You run your own servers or rent fitting ones and make sure they are available for your users. Photon's logs and performance counters provide all necessary information about low level performance and stability.

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Scalability.

Photon Cloud

The Photon Cloud scales automatically to accommodate all your users. Using our SDKs your client application is built for an efficient load balancing workflow.

Photon Server

Our load balancing power-up is available in source code. It is a solid foundation to scale across multiple servers. Running the right number of servers for your customers is your responsibility.

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Licensing.

Photon Cloud

Choose between various subscription models from indie development to enterprise solutions check out our different pricing models now. Why don't you just give it a try? Photon Cloud comes with a free Plan for up to 20 CCU per app.

Photon Server

Licenses are bought through the shop and provided as download. Cheaper licenses limit the number of concurrent users per server. Optionally, an Enterprise License is available for any number of servers upon request.

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Game logic.

Photon Cloud

All custom logic takes place on the application client to allow a zero-hassle experience.

Photon Server

The server's logic can be fully customized in C#. Several pre-defined applications are available as source and provide a high performance framework for your application. Benefit from our protocols and abstraction of low level functionality and add any feature you might be missing.

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Start instantly.

Photon Cloud

Photon Cloud lets you register and immediately run your application. No setup needed. No server needed.

Photon Server

Once downloaded, start in less than 5 minutes. Photon is easy to setup and runs locally as well as remote.