Abstract-The Discrete Fourier Transform is one of the fundamental operations in digital signal processing. This paper presents a software based implementation of the less known Recursive Discrete Fourier Transform on the PC x86 architecture and Microchip PIC30 microcontroller. The results are compared with an efficient/optimized Fast Fourier Transform implementation. Both algorithms require complex operations with real valued adders and multipliers, thus a complex result has to be calculated separately for the real and imaginary parts. During the implementation a floating-point number representation is applied. The comparison is performed based on the required resources and computational time.