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We are going to build a enterprise grade application on Web and for that we have filtered down our choices to ExtJS and KendoUI.

Both are decent and have rich features / controls, KendoUI is faster in performance than ExtJS but then ExtJS is like much more complete package which includes every component required to build desktop like web application and Grid seems more powerful.

on other hand with KendoUI we have power of jQuery and feel like home familiarity and almost zero learning curve because team already uses jQuery.

Does anyone have experience building large enterprise class application using either of them? and if yes what is your experience? Please share be it bad or good so that I can have some ground before I end up going with anyone of them for long time.

I am leaned towards ExtJS more because we are going to use a scheduler control which is from CubeDrive (myCalendar) which is again in ExtJS.

So your thoughts and experiences are welcome for helping me taking a right decision.

deej
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    This question should not be closed as non-constructive, as answers provided by user will be of help to those users who are confused with the choice. It's like you already have answer but you need to ask yourself questions what are you looking for? – deej Dec 20 '12 at 12:57
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    Over the past year KendoUI has grown up quite well and for all future projects I would prefer using KendoUI unless there is a hard stop at it. – deej Jun 03 '13 at 12:01

4 Answers4

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This is not a question that can be answered by us. You already give a solid overview for your team (which is all that matters):

Same

  • rich controls

ExtJS Pros

  • more widget components
  • scheduler control

ExtJS cons

KendoUI Pros

  • faster (I'm not so sure about that)
  • no learning curve
  • jQuery community support
  • Material Design theme

KendoUI Cons

  • smaller set of widgets in the open source Kendo UI Core (grid, charts are in the Professional version)
  • no Architect

I'm sure an application can be built with both frameworks. What's more important to you? Fast delivery (you say that your developers can jump right in with KendoUI), or strategic orientation for the future?

That being said, we are developing with ExtJS. We are generally satisfied, with some caveats:

  • The documentation is often outdated or incomplete (that's improving with recently introduced community comments)
  • It not trivial to expand the functionality of some built-in widgets
Dan Dascalescu
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ipavlic
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    * Full Disclosure: I work for Kendo UI * Kendo UI was engineered to be lightweight and fast. It is built on jQuery so it's simple to use if you are familiar with jQuery syntax. It also has a strong focus on HTML5 and making sure newer features (like CSS 3 transitions) are used when possible, but falls back to supported features (like jQuery animate) on older browsers like IE 7. Kendo UI also comes in three flavors: Kendo UI Web, Kendo UI DataViz and Kendo UI Mobile. It's optimized for touch as well. A free trial is available with no strings. http://www.kendoui.com/download. – Burke Holland Jul 18 '12 at 16:10
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    @BurkeHolland Thank you for the web-site summary. Do you have any comparisons for real-life situations? – ipavlic Jul 18 '12 at 20:25
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    saddened that this question is closed by SO. seems very reasonable to me. That said, I think they both have great potential. I would take issue with KendoUI has no learning curve. I spent several hours trying to figure out how to turn the title bar off of the tab pages container so I could treat it like a wizard. The doc was very little help. – Peter Kellner Mar 10 '13 at 02:57
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I only have experience with ExtJS not Kendo. So I would like to share my thoughts on ExtJS.

We are building a web based data analytics solution that is running on Azure cloud. We have already deployed version 1.0 in to production and got all positive feedback from users.

Pros

  • ExtJS provided us with a rich set of UI controls and a good data manipulation framework.
  • The main reason we went for ExtJS was that it had a wonderful drawing and charting framework.
  • Integration with ASP.NET/MVC3/WCF server-side was flawless. All components UI or otherwise work in a consistent manner.

Cons

  • ExtJS still have major bugs in some newly added components like charts and drawing packages. When they fix bugs they also introduce new bugs which is really annoying.
  • Documentation is somewhat outdated and you have to dive in to framework source more often.
  • ExtJS does not support touch inputs and UI controls look like Office 2003/7 which is bit old fashioned.
  • Difficult to introduce new themes.
  • Creating deployments using JSB3 is a real headache, especially when you want to integrate the building process with Visual Studio or TeamCity like build environment.
  • ... ;-)
jorel
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5

we are doing survey like application for past 6 months. i am not happy with extjs performance.

Pros

  • Rich widgets controls (tree and grid controls looks very useful)
  • It provides MVC architecture out of box
  • For me its documentation and framework source looks good.
  • After the initial hurdles of integration with server side, it works fine.

Cons

  • when you dynamically adding controls it is not that much cross-browser friendly. for IE6 and IE7, you have to use some css styles also to make the looks same.
  • Speed is very less in IE7 when loading controls, Pages which takes 3-5 seconds in chrome and Firefox will take 20-25 secs in IE7, and in IE9 it is better with 5-8 seconds. for getting this much speed we used extjs suspend layouts and refined the code multiple times.
  • extjs out of box controls are much boxy type(thick borders for tab control and panels) and we need to use much css styles for getting our look and feel
Jom
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We just completed similar project using ExtJs: a big, enterprise-class web application to manage large amounts of data. When we were selecting a framework for this project (about 6mo ago) we also looked at KendoUI but decided to go with ExtJs mainly because of its rich grid control.

We do have a lot of grids in our application and it was one of the main if not the most important feature. We didn't have any in-house experience with either of them - so the learning curve wasn't a question.

hopper
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sha
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  • hm.. sounds good, was that over the Internet and how about initial loading time of ExtJS? If it was external client facing application - did you faced any browser memory leak issues so far? – deej Jul 12 '12 at 17:49
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    We just deployed it into production. So I haven't got good stats as far as memory leaks. As far as loading speed - after you minify the app and framework - we're talking about loading into browser (first time) 2-4 files total size of about 2M... And I think framework itself corresponds to about half of it. Depending on your provider speeds - it's about 10-15 sec. – sha Jul 12 '12 at 17:51