Web Application Vs Desktop Application

Web Application

• Hosted in central server.
• Easy maintenance, customization, integration and upgrade.
• High scalability, accessibility and sharing.
• Less resources required for clients. A compatible browser like Chrome or Firefox is enough.
• Platform independent. Any sort of device within the network and a browsing application is enough.
• High dependency on network ( internet or intranet )
• Application failure can cause whole system down and affect all clients.
• Hosting Servers need to be powerful and hence can be expensive( also online web hosting packages can be comparatively expensive)
• Slow application development and complicated installation/hosting.

Desktop Application

• Application installed on local machine ( i.e on client's computer)
• Independent of networks and also able to work offline.
• Faster to develop and install.
• Secured due to local application installation
• Highly compatible for softwares regarding hardwares
• Requires manual installation by each client
• Scalability limited due to resources
• Local storage and resource usage eg. hardwares and memory
• Low data portability.

Anyway, web and desktop applications have their own pros and cons. They have their own importance based on requirements and should be developed corresponding to the situation. We
cannot just rank any one of them as first or second.

Lets suppose if your clients are world wide spreaded and you need to perform frequent communication, data sharing or need to work on common business framework, then its good to have web application.

But lets suppose you want to build an application which will access your hardware (i.e camera, microphone, graphics card etc) or lets say you don't have a powerful central server which is able to hold multiple requests from your clients, you can think of a good desktop application which will use your client's resource for the application performance and you can use your server as a central database server.

So, based on the infrastructures you have and also the business requirements from your client, you have to choose the efficient type of application.