What are the best Javascript UI Widget Toolkits?

Question

12

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Considered

50

User
Recs.

Dec 3, 2019

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

11 Options Considered

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

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Aurelia

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score 15 · Answer 1

Kendo UI

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 Con

Commercial for the full set

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

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score 10 · Answer 2

Syncfusion JavaScript UI Controls

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

Top Pro

Free community license

See All

score 2 · Answer 3

Dojo Toolkit

Top Pro

Highly modular

Dojo Toolkit is a highly modular framework. It uses AMD modules and the module system is extremely powerful and easy to learn. See More

Top Con

Not able to keep up with the future of the web

The web is moving towards web components, something that Dojo does not implement. In its current state Dojo badly needs more abstraction and it also needs to provide some form of modern application architecture. See More

Top Pro

Not only web apps

Dojo is not used only for web development. The widgets featured in Dojo can also be used to create mobile user interfaces. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 4

Element

Top Pro

JQuery is not required

Top Con

Poor mobile support

Element is not responsive See More

Top Pro

Good documentation

The documentation is per version and it has basic examples that are easy to understand. See More

Top Con

Needs Vue JS

This can be PRO if you already using Vue for your project. See More

See All

score 4 · Answer 5

Sencha Ext JS

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

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score 3 · Answer 6

Vaadin

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score 2 · Answer 7

jQuery UI

Top Pro

Cross-browser compatibility

jQuery UI, like jQuery has great cross-browser and backward compatibility with the most popular browsers on the market. See More

Top Con

Slow development

jQuery UI development is rather slow and new features or components are not released frequently. See More

Top Pro

Globalization support

jQuery UI has internationalization (globalization) support. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 8

SmartClient

Top Pro

Good documentation

There is an online showcase and a 100+ Getting Started guide See More

Top Con

Expense: Free LGPL version but expensive to leverage the real power of the framework

The Developer version starts at $745 / Developer See More

Top Pro

Advanced UI widgets

Layouts, grids, forms with a lot of builtin functionality. See More

Top Con

Difficult to integrate with other frameworks like React, Vue, Angular...

SmartClient has it's own layout mechanism and doesn't have anything like Kendo UI's framework support for Angular, React, Vue, .. See More

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score 1 · Answer 9

Zino UI

Top Pro

Has fallbacks for unsupported HTML5 features

Although Zino supports all modern HTML5 features, it also has graceful fallbacks in case a user is using a browser that does not support those features. See More

Top Con

No theme support

Zino UI provides developers with four themes out of the box. But if a developer wants to create their own custom theme, Zino does not have a theme builder. See More

Top Pro

Compliant with web standards

Zino adopts various w3c conventions such as WAI-ARIA, SVG, and HTML5 Canvas. See More

Top Pro

PHP Server wrappers

ZinoUI can be easily integrated with any PHP framework or document through the PHP wrappers that it provides. See More

See All

Answer 10

Blueprint

Top Pro

Many components

There are a ton of components in this library, including even ones supporting non-ideal states! See More

Top Con

Poor mobile support

Ken Kinder's Experience

Good React-based UI framework with excellent widgets and a pleasing, modern UI See More

Top Pro

Looks great

The UI it generates is professional and polished See More

Top Con

Requires ReactJS

Top Con

Documentation lacks examples

Docs are thorough, but examples sparse See More

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score 1 · Answer 11

dhtmlxSuite

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11 Options Considered

My Recommendation for Kendo UI

My Recommendation for Kendo UI

MVVM support

Commercial for the full set

Great documentation

Not only web apps

My Recommendation for Syncfusion JavaScript UI Controls

My Recommendation for Syncfusion JavaScript UI Controls

Modular and written fully in TypeScript

Responsive and Touch friendly

Built-in themes

Fast release cycle

Free community license

My Recommendation for Dojo Toolkit

My Recommendation for Dojo Toolkit

Highly modular

Not able to keep up with the future of the web

Not only web apps

My Recommendation for Element

My Recommendation for Element

JQuery is not required

Poor mobile support

Good documentation

Needs Vue JS

My Recommendation for Sencha Ext JS

My Recommendation for Sencha Ext JS

Comprehensive documentation

Sencha CMD is bloated and frustrating to work with

Supports MVC and MVVM development

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

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

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

Support for easy theming of applications

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

Visual Design tool available

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

IDE Plugins available

Difficult to integrate with 3rd party software

Charting package included

Can be expensive

My Recommendation for Vaadin

My Recommendation for Vaadin

My Recommendation for jQuery UI

My Recommendation for jQuery UI

Cross-browser compatibility

Slow development

Globalization support

My Recommendation for SmartClient

My Recommendation for SmartClient

Good documentation

Expense: Free LGPL version but expensive to leverage the real power of the framework

Advanced UI widgets

Difficult to integrate with other frameworks like React, Vue, Angular...

My Recommendation for Zino UI

My Recommendation for Zino UI

Has fallbacks for unsupported HTML5 features

No theme support

Compliant with web standards

PHP Server wrappers

My Recommendation for Blueprint

My Recommendation for Blueprint

Many components

Poor mobile support

Looks great

Requires ReactJS

Documentation lacks examples

My Recommendation for dhtmlxSuite

My Recommendation for dhtmlxSuite

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My Recommendation for Aurelia

My Recommendation for Aurelia

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