I have tried both and dragen was more polished and also faster (that depends on the GPU for parabricks of course). Also more features and they keep adding them.
Agreed that competition is good to have. There is also Sentieon and similar solutions which run on common hardware but are optimized.
Speaking of costs (both upfront and licensing), dragen imo is not expensive relative to sequencing costs (e.g. sequencers and flowcells). Surely it would be expensive to buy for occasional use.
By making parabricks free to use Nvidia tries to gain a market share I guess. In professional settings you still end up buying support and likely dedicated hardware (which is comparable in pricing). Good fit for the cloud and research environments that already have access to GPUs and/or are decoupled from actual sequencing.
