When comparing Kendo UI vs Telerik AppBuilder, 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 Telerik AppBuilder is ranked 18th. 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 Plugins for popular IDEs
Telerik provides Visual Studio and Sublime Text plugins for the AppBuilder.
Pro Integrates with Apache Cordova
AppBuilder offers a fast way to import Cordova plugins such as the camera.
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 Young project with a small community
AppBuilder is a young project that's been fairly slow to gain popularity. This means the community is rather small, so there is a limited amount of 3rd party learning resources available.
There is a forum, but it's not very active.