Are you planning to to clients who host it themselves?

Created by Zend, the company behind PHP itself, Zend Guard was historically the primary competitor to IonCube. It encodes and obfuscates PHP applications to protect against reverse engineering.

Ability to restrict code execution to specific external conditions.

The Ultimate Guide to the Best PHP Obfuscators: Protecting Your Source Code From Prying Eyes

Recursively obfuscates entire project directories, configuration files to exempt specific framework names or classes, and clean CLI integration for Git/CI/CD pipelines.

Requires server loader installation; commercial license cost. 5. PHPLockit

[ Your Clean PHP Code ] │ ├─► Obfuscation ──► [ Scrambled, Unreadable PHP Code ] ──► Runs on standard PHP servers │ └─► Encryption ───► [ Binary/Encrypted File ] ─────────► Requires custom server extension PHP Obfuscation

Obfuscation modifies the syntax of the code. It renames variables to random characters, removes whitespace, scrambles control flows, and encodes strings. The resulting code is still standard PHP and runs on any standard server without extra extensions, but it is incredibly difficult for humans to read or reverse-engineer. Code Encryption (Zend Guard / IonCube)

The "best" obfuscator depends on your threat model:

Note: "Time to Crack" estimates assume the attacker has full access to the encoded file and a PHP environment.