Play Framework vs ASP.NET Core

It's like Java, but more Haskell-y.

Play has quite a large community which provides numerous tutorials and videos related to developing with Play.
The Play official documentation covers many things, such as the framework itself but also specific stuff such as Akka, SBT and Netty.

There are also many big companies that base their main sites around Play, one of them is LinkedIn which provides third-party documentation on a regular basis.

Play uses Akka for concurrency, Scala for a templating engine, Netty as a client-server framework and SBT (Simple Build Tool) for building. And they all come out of the box.
Play also comes with the option to scaffold your applications. Play is an all-embracing ecosystem designed to increase developer productivity and shorten development times.

Play is very simple to get started. The documentation is very helpful for beginners and advanced users alike and the official website has a great "Getting Started" tutorial to begin developing with Play.

Play framework's convention over configuration methodology makes most Play projects have a very similar structure. This means that the code written for the framework is very readable. This enables a developer to switch between applications without having to relearn the ecosystem for every project. The built-in templating system also helps with code and makes it possible to have a very low count of lines of code.

Java is one of the most widely known languages, so people coming from that background can jump right in and not have to learn a new language syntax.

Thanks to breakthroughs in ROSLYN compiler and the efforts of the .NET COre developer team, code written in C# can reach speeds just a step behind C++.

Can run on Windows, Linux and Mac (also Visual Studio Code editor).

In .NET Core 2.1 and 3.0, new APIs are added that make it possible to write JSON APIs that require less memory, using Span<T> and UTF8 strings, and improve throughput of applications like Kestrel, ASP.NET Core web server. See also Utf8JsonReader.

Both microsoft and 3rd party tutorials are mostly of high quality and encourage you to use the industry best-practices.

Built-in middleware featuring: Authentication, Cookie policy, Health Check, MVC, Session etc.

Ability to host on IIS, Nginx, Apache, Docker, or self-host in your own process.

It is a very secure platform.

Both VS and VSCode are powerful free IDEs that are well integrated with ASP.net Core. VS Community also allows for commercial use for projects with less than 5 developers.