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What are the best Javascript UI Widget Toolkits?

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Jan 11, 2019

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Here’s the Deal

8 Options Considered

Best Javascript UI Widget Toolkits	Price	GZipped size	Minified size
-- Kendo UI	-	-	-
-- Syncfusion JavaScript UI Controls	-	-	-
-- Dojo Toolkit	-	-	-
-- Sencha Ext JS	-	-	-
-- Vaadin	-	-	-

Kendo UI

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Top Con

Commercial for the full set

You have to pay to get the license to use all the tools. See More

Top Pro

MVVM support

Kendo UI also provides a powerful MVVM framework. It's not really required that you use it though, or you can use another framework (like Backbone) with Kendo. But the Kendo MVVM has some powerful features and supports data binding. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

The documentation for Kendo UI is thorough and comprehensive. It explains every part of the framework in an understandable way. Plus, it also has beginners guides and tutorials which can get you quickly up to speed even if you don;t have any experience with Kendo. See More

Top Pro

Not only web apps

Kendo UI has three powerful sets of widgets which can be used separately or together. There are widgets available for web apps, mobile apps and data visualization. See More

Syncfusion JavaScript UI Controls

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Top Pro

Modular and written fully in TypeScript

All components have been built as modules to enable selective referencing, so only the components and features you need are included in your application. See More

Top Pro

Responsive and Touch friendly

All controls are touch friendly and render adaptively based on the device they are on to provide optimal usage experience on phones, tablets and desktops. See More

Top Pro

Built-in themes

All 4 major themes are available such as Google's Material, Bootstrap, High contrast and Office 365's Fabric themes. See More

Top Pro

Fast release cycle

4 major releases per year and weekly patch release See More

Sencha Ext JS

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Top Pro

Comprehensive documentation

The Sencha documentation is comprehensive, with detailed documentation and a number of examples displaying the various widgets, tools and themes. See More

Top Con

Sencha CMD is bloated and frustrating to work with

To do any meaningful development, you are stuck with CMD. There is a gulp task that will handle the JS concatenation, but there is nothing outside of CMD that can handle theming in their ecosystem. In addition, CMD is based on Java, and is very heavy to run (600MB+ on Windows 10 to watch for changes in the application and recompile). See More

Top Pro

Supports MVC and MVVM development

Top Con

Sencha CMD (their CLI) is under documented, and out of date

Their latest release of CMD changed some configuration locations, but the documentation was not updated to reflect this. There is no reference guide on the json configuration files, other than the (unfortunate use of) comments in the generated json files. See More

Top Pro

Supports Web and Mobile deployment out of the one framework or codebase

Top Con

They use proprietary extensions to SASS, making it incompatible with anything but their Fashion processor

On the plus side, you do not have to install ruby alongside CMD for more recent versions of ExtJS. However, their Fashion processor seems to only be available through CMD. See More

Top Pro

Support for easy theming of applications

Top Con

Too often breaking changes between versions. They have little concept of backwards compatibility

Compounded by the fact that there are now two "toolkits" in the same "version" of ExtJS, with certain components not existing in one vs the other. See More

Top Pro

Visual Design tool available

The Sencha Architect product allows you to visually build your application, or rapidly prototype a system. See More

Top Con

The IDE tools are not sold separately - you must purchase the appropriate license pack

You get all the IDE plugins, even if you only need one. They should offer sell them individually, or continue to bundle them with a dev license pack. See More

Top Pro

IDE Plugins available

A number of plugins are available for some of the commonly used IDEs (eg: JetBrains, Eclipse, Visual Studio), providing templates, refactoring support, hinting and code completion/generation, as well as management of includes and other time-saving features. See More

Top Con

Difficult to integrate with 3rd party software

Any third party library you wish to include has to be wrapped in some sort of component adapter. You have to do a lot of tweaking to get the build process right if you want the 3rd party lib to be bundled into your application in the right order. See More

Top Pro

Charting package included

Top Con

Can be expensive

The framework is a commercial package, and the recent decision to start with a minimum of 5 users may rule out smaller developer teams or startups. Recently, they have started a program that allow essentially what are contractors to purchase single licenses, but not individual, independent developers. See More

Vaadin

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dhtmlxSuite

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Aurelia

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