When comparing Kendo UI vs SmartClient, 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 SmartClient is ranked 8th. 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 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 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.
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 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, ..