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Add to SafariWhen comparing Kendo UI vs Sencha Ext JS, the Slant community recommends Kendo UI for most people. In the question“What are the best Javascript UI Widget Toolkits?” Kendo UI is ranked 1st while Sencha Ext JS is ranked 6th. 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.
Question Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Comprehensive documentation
The Sencha documentation is comprehensive, with detailed documentation and a number of examples displaying the various widgets, tools and themes.
Pro Supports MVC and MVVM development
Pro Supports Web and Mobile deployment out of the one framework or codebase
Pro Support for easy theming of applications
Pro Visual Design tool available
The Sencha Architect product allows you to visually build your application, or rapidly prototype a system.
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.
Pro Charting package included
Cons
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
