RoyalCommands vs Essentials vs CommandBook

For the past two years i have used Essentials. I am so over comfortable with it, i have never really felt like changing plugins. However i am curious if there is anything better.

As of now Essentials works flawlessly for us, but other plugins like RoyalCommands everything and more i believe , when i glanced at the commands. Then there is a huge niche group of people who fan boy of CommandBook and i like sk89q other plugins so i know he is a good developer.

We have had some performance issues recently (since 1.3) where our CPU bottlenecks (Xeon 1270)
Everyone says how clunky Essentials is. I am wondering out of these three which has the best performance and which is better all around?

Currently Essentials handles almost everything on my server, but maybe its time for a change.

What does everyone else think?

 

essentials isnt performance intensive. every profiling ive seen done essentials show that it never uses an amount that is noticeable on the server. for comparison, worldguard and worldedit each can use atleast x5 more than essentials, from the profiling ive seen.
your performance issues are probably coming from 1.3.1 it self, unless you forgot to update your plugins.
also check my signature for command list of essentials.