For intermittent use for protection and if you're not so worried about aesthetics, definitely go with alodining. No one seems to run anodizing as a side project successfully for any length of time. It seems like more of a thing you try once and then decide it's not worth it and go back to sending stuff out. By contrast, my old university physics shop had a couple of big garbage pails with alodining fluid in them and they lasted for years, didn't produce fumes, didn't require power and didn't seem to degrade. Likewise we have run a small in-house powder coating setup for the last 12 years with great success, but that is quite a different thing for different applications than alodining.
NB We actually also have a fluidized bed coater. The reason we have one is that fifteen years ago, Dan Gelbart was messing around with them and thought they were a great thing, so I built one too, in around 2007. I actually built one because by then, Nordson, who made Gelbart's, and ceased production of small fluidizing boxes. But it turns out that regular powder coating, if you have a decent gun, is much easier and better almost all the time. Fluidizing with a nylon coating does give an incredibly tough and slippery coating, but it tends to be very thick so is hard to use on parts that require some precision. It also requires more like 300C where powder coating is normally 190C so that's hard, and preheating means you have to handle the delicate coating process with a part at 300C rather than putting it in the oven cold and even letting it cool to room temp after if the part is heavy. So it's a pain in the ass and we very rarely use it except where we can take advantage of the low friction coating as a bearing surface of some sort.
