Throughout the last few years with the rise of SaaS as a solution for hosting software, much has been debated regarding whether or not this is much better than On-Premise for hosting web widgets. Before deciding which is best for your website, let’s take a closer look at what each solution is, along with the pros and cons tied to each.

What is On-Prem?

On-Prem, also known as ‘On-Premise Software’, is installed and ran exclusively by the customer. For this reason, if you’re looking to implement new widgets for your site, you would need to install and run the software needed yourself. Everything will be ran on your server.

What is SaaS?

SaaS, also known as ‘Software as a Service’, is run on another company’s server and can easily be accessed by different people from different locations. Since the software is entirely hosted by another company, they can easily manage their infrastructure and are able to add any upgrades or features you may require quite easily. SaaS is typically found and hosted on the cloud.

Pros of On-Prem Software

On-Prem software offers some benefits over SaaS. For instance, since you are controlling every aspect of the software, you can easily tweak and integrate the widgets to be inclusive to any part of your site. Having hands-on control of your widgets and being able to change the code as you wish is the main reason why you may want to choose On-Prem. Every aspect of the widget is modifiable.

If you’re looking for more security, and have a firm grasp on code, On-Prem is an option to utilize. You can easily dictate where all of your widget’s data is stored and can design your widget to be implemented anywhere.

Cons of On-Prem Software

The main con of implementing On-Premise software for your site is that it can often become costly when first starting out. Along with having to pay additional costs for server space if your widget receives a lot of traffic, you’ll also have to worry about maintenance or upgrades yourself.

On-Prem also has some technical disadvantages compared to SaaS software. Whenever you encounter a bug in your code, or something is not working correctly, you’ll have to fix anything associated with your widget on your own.

Pros of SaaS

SaaS implementation with your website’s widget offers many benefits, main being time consumption. Since another company is handling the hosting of the widget, they will be able to offer frequent updates and changes that you’ll never have to worry about. All you need to do is customize it as you would like and add the code to your site.

Along with this, the cost of running your site will be somewhat cheaper, as another company will be handling the data storage and bandwidth associated with your widget. And if you want to tweak your widget in any way, you can easily regenerate some brand new code. SaaS provides data security, free upgrades to the code, and may be of no cost to you.

Cons of SaaS

The main concern most people have with SaaS when choosing to create widgets for their website is that they lose a portion of control. For instance, if the company who is hosting the widget has their server go down, there is not anything you can do except to wait. Along with this, your abilities to customize your code are limited to some extent, as it depends on what the company’s SaaS allows you to do. If you’re the type of person who is a code monkey and needs to tweak code to get it to work with various parts of a site, SaaS may not be your best choice.

Which is best for My Site’s Widgets?

Choosing, which is best for your site’s widgets, depends entirely on how much you know about web design and what your goals are. The implementation of the best goal is also something to be considered, since specialized knowledge is required if building a widget solution from the ground up – if you don’t have staff already in place, online recruitment is a good starting point for scoping out potential freelancers or even hiring for a permanent developer depending on the scale and budget of the operation. However, that isn’t to say that such knowledge can’t be learned by existing teams and if the time frame allows, it’s certainly a rewarding and highly valuable skill set to learn.

In a nutshell, if you enjoy tweaking your code down to every last detail and have a site that makes it hard to implement widgets because of everything that is going on, stick to On-Premise Software. However, if you are engaged in several activities and you consider time as equal asset to money, if you are not familiar with every single aspect of coding, or if you just want some freedom from your site, consider SaaS as your best choice. In this manner, you won’t have to worry about additional data costs and customization becomes quite easy and user-friendly.