Grails vs ASP.NET Core

Grails is an abstraction over Spring and Hibernate. This makes Grails applications fast and scalable. This is because both Spring and Hibernate are themselves scalable.

Grails is a full-stack web framework, not just MVC. It contains a lot of stuff out of the box, but it doesn’t enforce it. It contains over 900 plugins which provide a Groovy API for a lot of useful and well-known Java libraries. And what is more important is that they are super easy to install!

Setting up a new project is quite fast and code generation (scaffolding) saves you a lot of time. It also uses a convention over configuration principle which helps you bypass all the configuration trouble.

Grails also comes with a reloading mechanism out of the box.

Grails is designed to be a rapid development framework with a straight learning curve. It advocates convention over configuration. Extensibility is very simple when using plugins (there is a lot of them). One command in the console – and all the dependencies and configurations are managed for you.

Do you need something advanced in the UI? You can either create it in GSP with an addon of CSS/JavaScript or you can find a plugin that will do the work for you. Plugins include integration with Bootstrap, jQuery, Yeoman and much more.

The Documentation section is actually a wiki, which can be modified by any logged in user. It has an official manual, tutorials, screencasts, a sample app and much more. If that does not do it for you, then there are countless third-party tutorials, more than 12k questions on SO and much much more

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.