Flexmonster Pivot Table & Charts Component vs. Progress Kendo UI vs. Microsoft BI (MSBI)

Fantastic product to embed in any SaaS solution for reporting and data exports. Excellent performance, ability to customize fields and tons of other features out of the box that makes it a well-rounded tool that is easy to use. To top it off their support is amazing for answering technical questions quickly and they provide great examples to learn how to interact with the code. We are very happy with our choice to use Flexmonster!

Incentivized

It allows us to extend the components or create new components in an easy way. The control suite is complete and powerful enough that you do not need to consider other competing packages. The controls are relatively easy to implement and when we ran into problems the documentation and online support were very reliable.

Incentivized

Microsoft BI is well suited for Stream analytics, easy data integration, report creation and UI/UX designs (limited but what all available are great ones) Microsoft BI may be less appropriate for handling huge number of datasets and difficult queries. It may also be difficult for a company with heavy data.

• Kendo UI controls provides rich set of features and capability that is required for enterprise products.
• Performance of controls are satisfactory overall though few other vendors provides extraordinary performance for specific controls and for specific purpose. Kendo UI provides most of the required controls and with rich feature that made us to select Kendo UI controls for our development.
• Kendo UI controls quality, in terms of performance, robustness and well defined interfaces are very positive notes.

Incentivized

• Comparatively easy to use compared to other data analytics solutions, collaborating with other colleagues on data work is simple.
• Using Visual Studio for database, ETL, reporting, and analytics development save time and money.
• Transfer of data from one application to another via Excel and comparison of data attributes between applications
• Dashboard functionality, as well as Python support, are available, allowing you to add additional charts and graphs.

Incentivized

• Kendo UI is always moving forward and staying current with latest development trends. While that is beneficial, that can cause some issues when supporting customers (particularly government) that don't move their IT infrastructure along nearly as fast. A prime example is web font icons. Great and easy to use, but where Kendo UI utilizes web font icons as the sole means of displaying an icon, not all organizations (again, especially government) allow the use of these. There have been times where Kendo UI became unusable and we had to downgrade to a version a few years old. Makes continued payment for licenses sometimes feel wasted as we may not be able to always use the new releases
• Kendo UI has a wonderful feedback system and they do indeed listen to the community. However, there do seem to be some instances where there is large support for a new feature/component and it never gets addressed. It is easy to understand that not all ideas are easy or even prudent to implement, but would be nice to see a better follow-up on ideas with a current status
• Refreshing Kendo UI grids is simple, yet the standard API method causes the grid to return to the default state. We have many use cases where we would love to update the grid data but need current grid state (such as expanded detail rows, sorts, filters, etc) preserved after the grid is updated so that users do not have to perform grid actions again to return to the desired state.

Incentivized

• The race to perfect gathering of Non-Traditional datasets is on-going; with Microsoft arguably not the leader of the pack in this category.
• Licensing options for PowerBI visualizations may be a factor. I.e. if you need to implement B2C PowerBI visualizations, the cost is considerably high especially for startups.
• Some clients are still resistant putting their data on the cloud, which restricts lots of functionality to Power BI.

Incentivized

Nothing better has come along. I'm always on the lookout for new UI libraries and I have tried most of them. Kendo has done a good job of keeping my business. They aren't perfect, but no one has done it better as far as I can tell. I'll keep a look out and my rating may change in the future if they get complacent.

Incentivized

Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.

Checks all the boxes! Easy to use, great out of the box feature set and fantastic support team

Incentivized

it's easy to implement in applications. The kendo widgets are able to be used in almost any type of business application which has a UI. For most part, once the developer has completed a project which uses Kendo, many time code can be copy/paste into a new application. Kendo UI documentation keeps improving so finding the answers to questions can be easy

Incentivized

The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.

Incentivized

The errors that we have detected were not of great importance and the online support provided a temporary solution until the next release.

Incentivized

The product has been reliable.

Reports sometimes take a bit of time to load

Incentivized

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.

Quick response to questions and feedback, excellent documentation for learning about the product and tons of examples to leverage.

Incentivized

Overall, we are satisfied with the support offered by the Progress Kendo UI team. We had raised few helpline incidents in the past and they have been resolved timely by the team. Also, we were satisfied with the level of information and support provided by the team.

Incentivized

While support from Microsoft isn't necessarily always best of breed, you're also not paying the price for premium support that you would on other platforms. The strength of the stack is in the ecosystem that surrounds it. In contrast to other products, there are hundreds, even thousands of bloggers that post daily as well as vibrant user communities that surround the tool. I've had much better luck finding help with SQL Server related issues than I have with any other product, but that help doesn't always come directly from Microsoft.

This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.

I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.

it took me about one day to make the components available for all the team members, including a quick demo, parallel setup in everyone’s workstation and packages deployment into our nuget server after 3 days of one to one support, everyone was able to use the components or find help in the documentation or resuest support

Incentivized

We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.

At the time of our product selection we identified better cross-browser compatibility and we estimated that turnaround for support was superior. At the time, the vendor had a higher positive feedback footprint among their user community.

We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.

Incentivized

Never faced a problem even when we threw a large amount of data at it

Incentivized

• Kendo UI has saved us a ton of time in development.
• We were able to get certain things to market faster due to the fact that we didn't have to piece multiple libraries together like is so common with modern web development.
• Because of the price of the library, however, we have not been able to purchase upgrades every year.

Incentivized

• As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
• However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.

Incentivized