Telerik Open Access ORM - Should I pay for my ORM?

Question

Is there anyone out there that has used the Telerik product and had good experiences with it, especially if you have also tried other ORM's? Are there specific advantages to Telerik's product that warrant the price tag? Why would I choose it over something free like nHibernate?

EDIT: Telerik says they are "Reflection-Free." Is there any merit to that?

Telerik also says that they support forward (model-first) and reverse (schema-first) mapping support. Could this potentially be a replacement for (not quite ready for prime time) Entity Framework?

Answer 1

I would recommend the free alternatives, but not because of any featureset. The advantage the free alternatives have is that they have a very wide user base, so more of your developers are likely to have nHibernate experience than Telerik ORM experience, and your newfound nHibernate experience will serve you well for the remainder of your career, wereas this may be the only project you ever see with Telerik ORM.

Answer 2

Apart from a watching a promising looking video and regular reminder that I must evaluate this (I downloaded it months ago) I've not used it yet.

I've used other Telerik products (RAD controls) though and taken a look at Sitefinity which looks quite nice. If you use anything else by Telerik then it may be advantageous to use this as it may come free as part of a bundle.

The other advantage of paying for your ORM is the support channels.

But the open source alternatives are pretty damn good these days...

Answer 3

Already used their ASP.Net Controls These controls are very nice and decrease the development time too much, but sure it will cost you some money, so our clients pay for that, or we buy it once and put in many projects.

About the telerik ORM:

Didn't use before, but i didn't think one day to buy it, but sure you may need to buy it because each ORM has a key option which make it better in some cases.

If you don't have special needs in your ORM, you can try some free ORMs first.

By the way i trust telerik, they are a very good company and doing things very nice.

Check List of famous .Net ORMs

Answer 4

Apparently no one uses the Telerik ORM, or is impressed enough with it to leave positive comments here.

Answer 5

Why spend money for that when there are some pretty good open-source (free) alternatives?

Answer 6

I use OpenAccess and are very happy with the product.

It's straight forward to use and very easy to implement and deploy.

The performance are good and it's safe to use (everything packed in transactions).

Telerik are dedicated to make OpenAccess the best ORM tool out there, and have an aggressive roadmap for the product.

You can download a free version and evaluate the product before you consider buying the full package.

Did I mention that the support are excellent and OpenAccess team members will pick up on good ideas and suggest solutions to whatever path you are on.

It's a "go ahead" from me.