Kendo UI is a robust performer, the web never looked better
Updated October 21, 2020
Kendo UI is a robust performer, the web never looked better
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Progress Kendo UI
8 years ago, I chose Kendo UI to rewrite a Flash based web-application so that the application could be used on mobile and desktop devices and be supported long term. This web-application is our company's sole web view product. Kendo UI is the closest thing to a complete web-view development package for building rich user-interface applications. Our organization is small, and we use Kendo as our primary web view development tool.
- Rich charting components allow developers to easily bind web-service data to bar charts, line graphs, and multiple axis charts.
- Reusable component features such as Export to Excel, Save To PDF provide out-of-the box export ability.
- Great documentation, examples, large developer community. Online examples and documentation make it easy to identify how each component works, the different options for invoking components, and in-page manipulation using the Kendo Dojo (http://dojo.telerik.com/).
- Wizard and Forms widget are an excellent addition, long overdue, and now make Kendo an even better package
- Advanced data grid that includes editing, grouping, search, responsive rendering, filtering, column hiding, etc.
- Datagrid editing using combo boxes sourced from independent datasources is allowed and is a very common use case, but isn't as easy to configure as text box editing, or fixed option editing. Since the pattern for dynamic combo box editing is quite routine, this appears to be something that could be integrated better into the grid.
- I have recently begun using the tree view component and there appears to be room for improvement with document the number of potential structures of data that can be used. Since the options for using the tree view are varied, I would like to see more examples. I personally ran into issues where field names in the JSON payload ( such as "level") caused problems rendering the tree.
- We are a small business. Kendo licensing is about small percentage of our overall gross revenue and is reasonable. In a world where many libraries are open source, I think the balance for our company is that Kendo is a single set of supported components. My alternative would be knitting together numerous open source libraries.
I briefly looked at Vaadin but the cost was higher, and look-and-feel seemed archaic. Google developers toolkit seemed to have too many dependencies and poor documentation.
I have never seen a good drag-and-drop designer for web development aside from Adobe's legacy product (Flex, FlashBuilder), which allowed a developer to create components, modify properties, events, and even state.
Kendo is the next best thing in my opinion.
I have never seen a good drag-and-drop designer for web development aside from Adobe's legacy product (Flex, FlashBuilder), which allowed a developer to create components, modify properties, events, and even state.
Kendo is the next best thing in my opinion.
Do you think Progress Kendo UI delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Progress Kendo UI's feature set?
Yes
Did Progress Kendo UI live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Progress Kendo UI go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Progress Kendo UI again?
Yes
Using Progress Kendo UI
2 - Two developers use Kendo UI in my organization as the primary component toolkit when building rich UI applications.
2 - Knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, data driven web-services, web UI design experience. The backend technology use for the hosting of data driven web-services can be anything. Java, PHP, NodeJS, .Net, etc. The beauty of using a tool like Kendo is that the view can truly be decoupled from the everything else.
- Up-to-date components, fresh updates, expanded component capabilities
- Ease-of-use, standardization across components
- Documentation and user community
- Kendo has a small set of mobile type tools that we used to create a mobile-like web application
- Kendo UI offers excellent in-browser manipulation of spreadsheet files so we have begun using these in lieu of regular Excel downloads or CSV extracts
- Improved app-like behavior for small mobile devices
- Increased data manipulation using in-browser spreadsheets vs. web forms
- Utilizing the advanced data grid features
Evaluating Progress Kendo UI and Competitors
Yes - 8 years ago, I began searching for a replacement for the Adobe Flash Builder tool I used to develop rich web applications. I received a recommendation from a peer that Telerik's Kendo product was good. I was new to HTML and javascript development at the time and Kendo made it an easier transition that trying to cobble together libraries from separate companies or developers.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
My company is small, so price was an important consideration. I also needed a broad range of widgets as I did not want to hand write tools and widgets myself and deal with different browser compatibility. I found the Kendo UI documentation and support to be outstanding and also found that Kendo has a large user base that is active.
My evaluation process was based on a balance of features, ease-of-use, and cost. I would keep this as my criteria and most likely, Kendo UI would come out on top again. I would probably add the criteria of long-term support. It appears that Progress is supporting the Kendo UI product and its life span appears to be indefinite at this point which is all you can ask.
Using Progress Kendo UI
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using | None |
- Widget consistency
- Product documentation and examples
- Drop-in functionality of widgets to existing web pages
- Since it is JavaScript based, some times troubleshooting Javascript errors is problematic, but not the fault of Progress
- Updating libraries (if done in piecemeal) can cause problems. Always better to import the entire library for updates
Yes - Kendo provides a smaller set of widgets for mobile development. I have used a few of them and find them easy to use and of high quality. I do not think this is their main focus, and not mine either. I use Kendo to create web applications for use by regular laptop, desktop, or tablet screens.