Overall Satisfaction with Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition
As a UX Engineer, I am responsible for creating a Design System in coordination with our UX Designers. We bought Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition to help us get quick access to a great chunk of components. Some we still need to create ourselves of course. We created our own theme based on Material that is applied on top of the Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition components. Previously we had tried to create our own component library but we now appreciate the speed of using an existing component library. The documentation is mostly very helpful, sometimes some links don't work, but all in all, it's very easy to use and comprehensible. It is also very helpful to be able to view the source code which helps understand how some components work.
- API Documentation
- Demo Pages
- Support
- 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.
- The support/ticket system. We get quick answers to any issues we have.
- It's hard to tell at this early stage but the development teams generally give good feedback as they no longer have to worry about creating components themselves.
- The initial effort to get everyone to use Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition is high, but it's slowly establishing itself as very useful within our organization.
We evaluated DevExpress and two other libraries, whose names I've currently forgotten. But in the end, it was a race between DevExpress and Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition, as they both offer a great amount of components with rich documentation. In the end we chose Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition as it was much cheaper than DevExpress (about half the price), so even if it may offer slightly fewer components, the price-value relation is much better. But both libraries offered a great number of components, great support, and community experience, great documentation, so it basically just came down to pricing.
Do you think Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition's feature set?
Yes
Did Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition again?
Yes
Using Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition
20 - I would say at least 10 people use it, but it is supposed to be used by every developer that does Frontend Web Development so it should expand to 20-40 people in the end, I guess. They are all developers, and then there are two UX Engineers that take care of Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition in the scope of our own Design System, as writing styles, offering support to Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition users, and so on. Our Designers also use Syncfusion Demo pages to ensure that their designs also correlate with what Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition has to offer.
2 - There's me and one other UX Engineer who take care of supporting Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition in-house. Of course, if there is a team of developers, there may be further people within those teams who have built up knowledge on Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition over time and give "in-team" support, but officially it's only the UX Engineers that do in-house support. The skills required are a good knowledge of Frontend Web Development, and also a keen eye for design. Communication skills are required to talk with designers and developers, and also to explain how Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition works.
- Quick implementation of new frontend pages or functionalities.
- Less stress due to centralized provision of Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition (and our own Component Library).
- Saving money as all components from Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition doesn't have to be written in-house.
- We were accidentally able to clone the Theme Studio and extend it according to our needs (CSS variables instead of SCSS variables, to enable theming).
- Giving back, so we are also able to create Pull Requests on Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition's GitHub, maybe we will be able in the future to also give back to the community (but we have nothing planned so far (-; ).