Don't roll your own if you don't have to. (Pro Tip: You really don't have to.)
March 28, 2018

Don't roll your own if you don't have to. (Pro Tip: You really don't have to.)

Joshua Weaver | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Kendo UI

We currently use Kendo UI for a few web apps both internally and within some commercial web applications. The customer facing products are used by numerous organizations and internally there are a set of Kendo UI components that are in use every day within a custom CRM solution that we have engineered. Kendo UI has a suite of widgets that cover many use cases that fill gaps in most web apps from rich data grids to simple things like event notifications.
  • Widgets have a simple API
  • Documentation is very good and easy to follow
  • They stay relevant with modern framework support for their components (e.g. Vue, React) in addition to Angular and jQuery
  • They have a steady stream of webinars and social events that keep you up to date with their latest and greatest
  • Documentation, while good, is only available for the latest release
  • If you lag behind the releases, it can be hard to be sure which API docs are still appropriate and relevant for your version
  • Can be pricy as a library of components when other free, open-source alternatives exist (although Kendo Core is free)
  • 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.
Back in 2013 when we made the decision to jump on board with Kendo, I had evaluated other products like Sencha and jQuery UI/mobile. Neither of these offered the ease of use and the breadth of scope that Kendo had. Sencha was close and offered a lot, but I remember trying to get through their tutorial samples and having trouble as a javascript newbie. In the end I selected Kendo UI because it gave us a lot — a Mobile Framework, Responsive Web Framework, and Huge library of widgets.
If you want a more comprehensive library of components and widgets, Kendo UI offers quite a competitive advantage. Their licensing is a little pricey, but you get a ton for the one-time price. What you get will allow you to build an entire front end to a web app without needing to look outside of the scope of Kendo, generally speaking. There are answers to even more utilitarian tasks like string manipulation and date/time manipulation methods that can be a substitute for moment js. Routing, color utilities, templating, local data stores, mobile phone ui, a plethora of widgets are all present.