When comparing jQuery Mobile vs Kendo UI, the Slant community recommends Kendo UI for most people. In the question“What are the best frameworks for developing cross-platform mobile apps with JavaScript?” Kendo UI is ranked 7th while jQuery Mobile is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Kendo UI is:
Kendo UI is separated into a commercial and open source frameworks. The core of Kendo UI is in the open source frameworks, but some usability and benefits of Kendo UI are lost without the commercial version.
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Pros
Pro Resources
With HTML5 development being relatively amateur jQuery Mobile has a vast selection of resources to assist. These resources include websites, books, apps and other frameworks, 3rd party plugins and extensions, and more. All of these can help ramp up and excel the project development cycle.
Pro ThemeRoller
An interactive tool that has been created to customize an apps theme. Users can import a current theme, make changes, and export the theme back to the app for integration.
Pro Download Builder
To optimize application development jQuery Mobile provides a tool to allow the user to customize the framework. It contains the ability to pick and choose which modules to include and then bundles the framework so it contains only what is needed.
Pro Free Core tools
Kendo UI is separated into a commercial and open source frameworks. The core of Kendo UI is in the open source frameworks, but some usability and benefits of Kendo UI are lost without the commercial version.
Pro Platform-based UI
Kendo knows what device it is being viewed on so it can adjust the UI accordingly. If a user is on a PC the user will see things differently than on a mobile device. Between iOS and Android the user will also notice a different as it pulls from the core UI of those core systems.
Pro Theme Builder
An interactive tool that has been created to customize an apps theme. Users are able to select from many pre-defined themes, edit them, and download the theme to bring into a project.
Cons
Con The project is practically abandoned
The last release was in 2014. Samsung Tizen Advanced UI (TAU), for example, was started with JQuery, but it was forked off and completely rebuilt from scratch with jQuery concepts but without JQuery dependency itself.
Con Clunky and slow
Con No MVC support
There is no included MVC support in jQuery Mobile. It is possible to achieve this, however, using other frameworks such as BackboneJS in combination with jQuery Mobile, but there are a few limitations. Specifically that MVC frameworks, such as BackboneJS or KnockoutJS, are not compatible with jQuery Mobile page routing.
Con Expensive commercial tools [$699, $1,499]
The other core tools developed with Kendo are the commercial tools. There is the Professional version for $699 that will result in more jQuery UI widgets and client support. The $1499 "DevCraft" Complete edition gets developers the DevCraft .NET toolbox, testing and debugging frameworks and applications, as well as priority support.