New year - new startup :) We are chosing ORM. I personally worked with LLBLGEN last years. I've looked through EF4 today and have found that its functionality is close to llblgen. (filtering, sorting, grouping, working with stored procedures and functions, working with graphs of objects (prefetch path), lazyLoad).
I know that llblgen doesn't support POCO, that means that it is required to write additional (or more complex) code to decouple it from Domain.
I don't think that llblgen license is con as llblgen is real successful alternative to Microsoft's orms and it is cool that we have such alternatives.
I didn't find any concrete comparison of these orms in stackoverflow. Just something like "If it is not critical to pay maney then use llblgen" :).
So I just want to list pros and cons of LLBLGEN and EF4. (ORMs functionality only without designers features)
Ok guys. Let me summarize my question after studying EF4.
It is possible to use EF4 with POCO objects that is good if you are working with Domain model. LLB doesn't support POCO.
LLB entities has state even without dataContext (Adapter scenario). It means that you can get entity in one context and save it in another and second context will know that entity is not new. EF4 will treat it as new Entity and it is require to write additional code to mark it as updated.
LLB has SelfServicing scenario that is good for small applications as entities have self saving and lazy load functionality.
As mentioned above, LLB has great support. It seems the rule is to answer during 8h in workdays and 24h in weekends.