DIALux or Relux…Which one is more popular?‎

DIALux or Relux

Which one is more popular?

A new but different article is written recently in the following link

DIALux Relux Report 2010

In the past, each company used to have its own software for lighting calculation or rendering, which makes the designer have trouble learning all of these software, moreover the print outs & documentations will be different form one room to another in the same project!

And what if the designer would like to design the lighting using luminaires form different manufacturers?

Using single software is obviously much better.Besides mastering one software is better than to know little about all.

But the question is what software shall I use?

In the market there are many softwares some of them are free and some cost money.

When we talk about free lighting software DIALux and Relux are the best in the market.

It shall be noted that Relux is not completely free; the plug-in for ray tracing (Radiance) is not free and cost money, while DIALux provide this option as free of charge (POV-RAY) and this option is very important to produce high quality images.

As a matter of fact in many cases this is the only way to show the customer the result of lighting design, as most of them don’t understand lux , luminance , UGR …etc

I used both then I stopped using Relux when I found that the Plug-in for CAD & Ray tracing is not free.

Using the POV-Ray of DIALux we can generate high quality images.

Personally I found DIALux very powerful and I was wondering which is used more around the world DIALux or Relux?

I don’t know if there is real survey about this but I made simple comparison.

The comparison is not about technical capability of each, it is rather about distribution of both software around the world and the result as of July/2008 is

By using Google trends (www.google.com/trends ), a tool that you can compare which words had been searched more , I found out that the word “DIALux” had more search than the word “Relux” by over 4 times!

The search of DIALux was 4.2 times more than relux in Google search engine

And to make sure that DIALux means the “software DIALux” nothing else, I used the website function which tells which website were visited more dial.de or relux.biz

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=dialux%2C%20relux&cmpt=q&tz=

DIALux has much more visitors than Relux

This gives indication that DIALux users around the world are much more than Relux users

Visitors of DIALux in Blue compared with visitors of Relux in red

And by using information form both websites dial.de and relux.biz, I found that DIALux has many partners outside Europe in the Far East China, Malaysia, Japan, and Russia and Middle East Saudi Arabia and Dubai and is being more international.

Actually DIALux has partners form 26 countries while Relux has only from 13 countries

Table below summarize the comparison

	DIALux	Relux
Number of Languages supported	26	19
Numbers of Partners	102	74
Number of countries (Nationality of the Partners)	26	13
Google Search (form Google trends)	80%	20%
Website visits (form Google trends)	Much more around the world

Also If you check the Traffic Rankings of both websites on alexa.com you will find that dial.de has a traffic rank of: 432,788 while Relux.biz has a traffic rank of: 1,329,600

which means that dialux website has higher rank than relux by almost 3 times

As a conclusion DIALux has more partners, languages and users around the world than Relux

And DIALux much more popular than Relux.

DIALux Relux Report 2010