Kendo UI - an excellent product
Updated September 19, 2017

Kendo UI - an excellent product

Alastair McDonald | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Kendo UI

As a self employed developer I use Kendo UI to build web applications, particularly Single Page Apps. I needed the best Scheduler control I could find that worked with the Aurelia framework and Kendo UI was the best choice by far.
  • The controls are reliable and powerful. I am always able to achieve what I set out to achieve.
  • I needed to extensively customise the popup "Add Event" form for the scheduler control and found that it supported all the changes I needed.
  • I like that I can customise the appearance with themes .
  • I like having the choice of using same controls either in an MVC app (with MVC helpers) or in a SPA using Javascript.
  • An area that could use more documentation is the different ways of connection to the server. There are lots of options but finding documentation on this takes perseverance.
  • Probably the weakest area I found was patchy support for Typescript. Interfaces and classes for Typescript are available, and they do work nicely, however I have run into a number of methods that are available in Javascript but not in Typescript. So far it has been possible to solve this by editing the Typescript source file to add the missing methods or properties.
  • I use Kendo UI with Aurelia which means the use of the Aurelia-Kendo UI bridge which is a third party product. Ideally I'd like the Kendo UI team to support Aurelia directly.
  • Kendo UI has been essential to the project because it provided a highly functional Scheduler control out of the box. Re-inventing the wheel by writing my own scheduler would have taken too much time.
  • The use of other controls such as the Grid control and list control provide similar productivity gains.
  • Being able to integrate Kendo UI with third party frameworks such as Aurelia or Angular has been vital.
I looked at several other control suites including Infragistics, DevExpress, and the JQuery controls. My choice was based on the functionality of the Scheduler and grid controls, functionality of other controls, integration with Aurelia or Angular, standard of documentation, ease of use, and quality of support. It seemed to me that Kendo UI came top in all categories.
I have no reservation about recommending Kendo UI. It is ideal for building great web user interfaces and comes with lots of useful controls, thorough documentation and excellent support. It is under active development and the team makes sure the controls stay relevant, e.g. by providing integration with Angular and other Frameworks. I have contacted their support team for a number of issues and found them to be helpful, professional and very knowledgeable. I have not used the mobile widgets so can't comment on them.

Having used Kendo UI for over a year for web development I have built up a confidence that I can do whatever needs to be done with these excellent controls.


Kendo UI Support

All my support requests have been answered promptly, professionally and knowledgeably.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
No - I have purchased the annual support package which I find perfectly adequate. Response times are good and I have no need for phone support.
Yes - I found some issues with their automatically generated TypeScript classes and interfaces. I found a suitable workaround (editing the TypeScript file myself to add in the missing methods) and accept that solving this issue is non-trivial and will take some time. I was given a reference number and link to the relevant Github repository so I can track progress on the fix.
I complained about a popup bar that continually popped up at the bottom of every page of documentation asking for feedback. I found this to be very intrusive and the popup could not be switched off. Progress listened to my complaint, adjusted their design to a fixed bar rather than a popup and let me test the fix to make sure it worked as I suggested. I was most impressed by their attentiveness, professionalism and thoroughness - top marks.