Verifone SDK vs Ingenico SDK

As already mentioned in my previous post, Verifone & Ingenico are the oldest & best POS products solution providers in market. But which device would you choose for building your POS payment application ?

Both Ingenico & Verifone SDK have all features to develop apps with any latest payment technology,

be it Magnetic Strip card, EMV Chip card, NFC card, NFC Mobile wallet etc.

Lets compare their SDK capabilites in more detail, may be that will help you decide which POS device to go with for your project.

	VERIFONE SDK	INGENICO SDK
EMV Library:	Available	Available
NFC Library:	Available	Available
Magnetic Strip Card API:	Available	Available
Connectivity: (options may differ depending on POS Hardware model)	Wifi, Bluetooth, GPRS, PSTN, Ethernet	Wifi, Bluetooth, GPRS, PSTN, Ethernet
Debugging code:	Tracing using log files can be done. Cannot debug directly since not integrated with any IDE.	Tarcing using log files. Add debug break points in IDE & watch variables possible via IDE - Ingedev
IDE:	There was a Visual Studio IDE support using a Verifone plugin for Vstudio earlier till 2011. Verifone stopped supporting Visual Studio Project Wizard Plugin. There is no IDE for Verifone development for now.	Ingenico has its own customised IDE made of Eclipse. Named as Ingedev. All IDE features are similar to the open source Eclipse IDE.
Display Fonts:	Verifone provides you with customisable fonts option. You can create your own fonts style & use it in your application.	There are very limited options available in font style & size in ingenico SDK.
make file:	need to make manual changes in make file, to add library, source code file, includes etc.	Changes can be easily made from project settings in IDE
SSL Certificates  support for communication:	Available	Available
Color Display UI Supporting Libs:	Available	Available
Timers:	Available	Available
Event handling:	Available	Available
Encryption Supported:	3DES, MD5, DES, RSA , AES	3DES, MD5, DES, RSA , AES
Interapplication communication:	Available There are total 15 slots available. Of which you can place your credit, debit, gift card application in 2nd-to-14th slot. 15th slot is for shared libraries to use between different applications. 1st slot is for application manager.	Available
Receipt Printer	Thermal Printer APIs Available. ( Mostly POS models having receipt printers are thermal printers. Receipt is printed using a thermal printer. No printer ink required, since text on receipt paper is printed with heat from printer - hence the name thermal printer. )	Thermal Printer APIs Available.
Secure Memory Location for PIN, Card Number - for PCI DSS compliance	Available	Available
SDK Help Documents:	Verifone has multiple pdf documents for SDK help. Which makes it difficult to search through all the different pdfs. But topics are categorized in these document. It would have been good if all pdfs were consolidated into a single pdf or chm file.	All API documentation is present in a .chm file. Which is easy to navigate & search topics or words. Also you can access this .chm help file from the IDE help for different SDK versions.
Final comparison view based on all points above:	Verifone SDK is good, but developer must be comfortable to work without an IDE. Verifone SDK has all the features required to develop a full POS system. Developer is given freedom to have fonts, or make file format the way he wants.	Ingenico SDK has a plus point with an Eclipse IDE available, making developers life easy.

Note:

The comparison values may change with new product series and new SDK versions launched by these companies.

The above comparision is based on following series of devices.
Verifone: Vx5XX series

Ingenico: iCT, iWL, iSC series.

There are other POS manufacturers as well which are good (example Hypercom, PAX, Beetle, etc.  local POS manufacturers are also available ), but you need to find out if they support the payment technology, certifications, are their products and SDK robust enough for your project requirements. If yes then you can select those as well for your project.