When comparing SmartClient vs Element, the Slant community recommends SmartClient for most people. In the question“What are the best Javascript UI Widget Toolkits?” SmartClient is ranked 8th while Element is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose SmartClient is:
There is an online showcase and a 100+ Getting Started guide
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Good documentation
There is an online showcase and a 100+ Getting Started guide
Pro Advanced UI widgets
Layouts, grids, forms with a lot of builtin functionality.
Pro Good documentation
The documentation is per version and it has basic examples that are easy to understand.
Pro JQuery is not required
Pro It's light but not empty
You can find for example date picker, option box, Sliders, Carousel, and all the basics like grid layout etc.
Cons
Con Expense: Free LGPL version but expensive to leverage the real power of the framework
The Developer version starts at $745 / Developer
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, ..
Con Needs Vue JS
This can be PRO if you already using Vue for your project.
