Progress Kendo UI vs. Quickbase vs. Syncfusion Essential Studio

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

I no longer think that Quickbase is the way of the future. They do not fix major bugs in a timely manner, and are releasing basic functionality behind a paywall. I believe that Enterprise Level Tier should be given certain things, like SLAs on Support and up-time. However, as a low-code no-code platform the majority of the accounts, "builders", and users are not going to be able to justify the cost of an Enterprise Tier Plan, and won't be able to use the features that Quickbase continues to advertise.

Incentivized

The datagrid is probably their most popular control I would think. It is so flexible and configurable. Most of mine are plain views in ASP.NET Core, but I have a whole bunch that are dynamically created at runtime in my controller. That is so powerful.

• 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

• Rapidly bring new ideas to life
• Great authentication and authorization system out of the box
• Connects with many major third-party services (via Pipelines)
• Reporting and Dashboards are awesome
• Excellent emails notification system to keep us in the loop when data changes
• Intuitive UI for building forms and reports
• Nice playground to test new ideas

Incentivized

• Integrates well into Microsoft tech stack. i.e. ASP.NET, Blazor etc. So it acts as a plug-n-play, which is great!
• Shrinks the development cycle without adding too much of its own ecosystem overhead.
• Provides different UI skins so the controls don't appear as "stitched".

• 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

• I'd like to see a link on email notices that take you directly into said notice. On an app that only has 1 or 2 email notices firing, there's no issue. However, we have some tools that are so complex that they have about 20 email notices firing at any given time based on the action users take. In this case, if we have to go in to modify a notice, we have to guess or scroll down the long list of notices to see which one we need to customize. It would be great if Quickbase had the URL of said notice somewhere at the footer of that notice so when Administrators click on it, it takes them into the exact notice they need to update.
• When filling out or reviewing a lengthy form, I'd like to see the Save & close button, as well as a Save & next option at the bottom of the form rather than having to scroll back up to the top of those forms just to click on those choices.

Incentivized

• Sometimes links point to dead addresses in the documentation.
• Some components have a difficult learning curve but that is usually due to the complexity of the control.
• Minor version changes introduce breaking changes, for example updating from 20.1.x to 20.2.x gives us licensing errors, which in my opinion is a kind of breaking change as it requires all users to update their licenses.
• Theming with CSS variables is not possible. Access to Theme Studio code is not possible. So a fully custom solution is needed to make Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition components themeable with CSS variables.

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

For our use-case of QuickBase, there really aren't any other products out there that can offer us the same out-of-the-box solutions they provide to us. We're also so integrated with it in our daily processes that to move away from it abruptly would cause mass chaos, so it's going to be renewed for at least the next several years.

Incentivized

It takes effort to include a new component library into existing software, especially in our case where we have 5 large applications that are written and maintained by about 100 developers. So changing such a core thing comes with a lot of effort. The other reason we will very likely renew our use of Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition is that it works really well and has helped us to speed up the development process.

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

Quick Base has done everything we have asked it to do and then some. Our original goal was to have one system for CRM that encompassed both the sales process and the customer management. We have gone w-a-y beyond that with analytics, project management, system bug logging, and historical effort reporting.

Incentivized

I would rate Syncfusion® Essential Studio® a 10 out of 10 for overall usability. The components are intuitive to implement, with clear APIs and consistent design patterns across the suite. This makes it easy for developers to get started quickly and reduces the learning curve even when working with new controls.
In addition, the documentation and sample projects provide practical guidance that helps accelerate development. The built-in customization options also allow us to adapt the components to fit our branding and business requirements without excessive effort. Overall, the usability is one of the key reasons why Syncfusion has become an essential part of our development toolset.

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

Incentivized

Once we did get Quick Base configured and customized it was reliably available when we needed it. We may have had one or two occasions when the product was inaccessible but those were few. The greatest challenge with its availability was its difficulty with integrating with our systems.

Incentivized

Reports sometimes take a bit of time to load

Incentivized

Some of our tables that hold over a million records are starting to perform poorly, with some summaries taking over 20 seconds to load. This may be an indication that it is best to archive old data when reaching large volumes like this.

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

If you utilize the community, the support is amazing. Unfortunately, I find their actual support system a bit underwhelming. They don't seem to have a great process for interacting directly with an issue and often sweep significant issues under the rug by categorizing them as "Enhancement" ideas or legacy items.

Although I have decades of software development experience, I had never created a website from scratch before, and my html and css skills are not particularly strong. Between documentation and incredible dedication from the support team they helped me overcome all of my challenges. It's amazing that they typically create sample code for most of the issues that I submitted. On rare occasions where I uncovered a defect they kept me informed as to its status, and typically resolved it in a short-term release, and/or gave me a reasonable workaround. They hopped on zoom calls with me on multiple occasions when necessary.

It is very easy to get training from their University portal and still if we don't know their, then we can ask their support too.

Quick Base already is having a separate portal of providing training to customers and it is very easy to use and updates as per the new features added in to the application

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

I was not directly involved with the initial account implementation, only a bystander. For the app I directly implemented for my department only, I wish I had know to create an app diagram first. I don't remember if that was suggested. I think that would be a great help tip tool when a new app is created, to have a page with a check list of what is needed or how to get started. If you are a regular app builder, then you can bypass it or have the ability to turn it off in the app settings.

Feedback from the team has been very positive.

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.

Well, there's a plethora of low-code tools out on the marketplace and, you know, there's a reason that we've decided to partner with QuickBase because it has all the right balance of the ability to integrate with the ability for a citizen developer to create apps successfully. So if you look at something like Zo Ho's low-code offering, for example, yes, there are some similarities there, but they're really dependent on all of their other licensed products to get you where you want to be, where with QuickBase you have the ability to truly create something custom.

Incentivized

Firstly, there is a free version for small businesses and it allows you to jump start without risk. I found one of the other products a bit short in the number of out-of-the-box supported events handlers for each control and, although you can manually add them, I feel more comfortable to just have them ready. After using the free version I just felt in love with Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition controls and decided to stay with them; they have all I need and more. The usage of Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition controls is straightforward and intuitive. Support is world-class even for the free version; you get answers in 24 hours at most. Also, the support team is ready to remotely connect to your project in case it is needed; we have had one situation like this, and the issue was solved.

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

Incentivized

It has evolved really well with our company, but there is a hard limit to the table size that has begun to affect us and not let us grow. The table size limit is set at 500 MB and we have had to jump through quite a few hoops to be able to get by.

Incentivized

For clients we use Qucik base to develop application

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

• ROI is HUGE. Our company saved over 3.5 million in one year alone based on developments that year in Quickbase that saved time for many teams
• Less user error - implementing automations and standardized workflows has led to less user error as was previously seen by maintaining spreadsheets or Smartsheets

• First of all, I think the best positive impact is the reduce of time development. I do not know exactly how much time, but certainly, using the framework we save a lot of effort and time.
• About negative impact, sometimes using the controls of the framewrok have a signifcant impact in the execution time and page load.
• And of course, the use of Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition has a significant impact of the learning of javascript and JQUERY.