DevExpress or Telerik

Douglas Troy

CPians I want your feedback/input/experience with DevExpress and/or Telerik controls. Which one have you used? Which one did you like better? (and why) Which one did you not like? (and why) Which one would you recommend? (and why) Other comments on these control suites are welcome Thanks for the feedback guys! [if it's not apparent, I'm looking to purchase one of these control sets and I wanted some users reviews outside their websites]

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Karl Sanford

I've only used Telerik, and I love them. The controls are very nice, but the clincher for me was their support. Very quick turn around, and very helpful.

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Douglas Troy

WinForms, ASP, WPF? (or all of them)

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Karl Sanford

ASP and WPF

Be The Noise

Douglas Troy

Great. Thanks for the feedback.

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Ravi Bhavnani

Haven't used either before, but have just started eval'ing them for use in an MVC environment. Telerik's controls (and APIs) look great. Maybe it's because I'm new to MVC (and jQuery), but I find their docs sorely lacking - so much so that their Program Manager spoke at their recent Keynote and promised "better docs". But other devs I've talked to have been pretty happy with Telerik, so I think I may go that route too. /ravi

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Douglas Troy

Thanks for the feedback Ravi.

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Tom Deketelaere

Used devexpress extensively for winforms development and been using telerik (cause that's what the new company uses) for webforms / mvc for the last month. I can't really compare the 2 cause well its web vs desktop development but so far I found devexpress to be better. There examples just seem clearer (could be my yet limited knowledge of web development tho). As to support the seem equal to me. Devexpress usually gives you a answer (and sometimes a corrected example if you provided one for them) within a day (if you have priority support, that comes with there suite's) or 2days without priority support. Even when you are just on a trial and haven't bought from them yet they answer within 2 days. Telerik seems the same. From personal experience I'd go with devexpress again, but once again that might be cause I have more experience with them.

Douglas Troy

Tom, great feedback. We have WinForms development we'll be doing along with WebForms, and probably some newer ASP.NET MVC work down the road, but your feedback regarding WinForms development with DevExpress is similar to what others have told me, so I'm currently leaning that way. From my research, I got the impression that you just pointed out: they are very similar.

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Lost User

Douglas Troy wrote:

Which one have you used?

DevExpress

Douglas Troy wrote:

Which one did you not like? (and why)

DevExpress. Come on, a reimplementation of a label? And why is there a property called "Properties"? It's as elephanting illogical as it can get.

Douglas Troy wrote:

Which one would you recommend? (and why)

WinForms - common controls. Because as a UI, they've been around for ages, your users know them and how to navigate those, and they're clean. Also, it doesn't introduce a new dependency to some softwareshop whose core-business it is to provide alternatives to label and button-controls. Their grid is "kind of" nice, as it allows the user to group the data as he/she sees fit. I've yet to come across a customer who actually needs that functionality.

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Douglas Troy

Eddy Thank you for your feedback, I appreciate it. I agree that the grid is nice, we actually use the DevExpress Grid control in a Delphi application, so I have had some exposure to that control, and for our business, we actually do use things like resorting of columns, dragging and dropping column headings for regrouping, etc. So we do actually find that functionality useful. We also use the Ribbon control, and users have grown to like that style interface. I have spent enough years/time developing my own derived controls/frameworks to know that I'd rather not be in the business of creating and maintaining controls. That said, however, when I do go to evaluate these control sets, I will be on the look-out for what you've mentioned above and take it into consideration. Thank you again for your time and input, D.

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Ennis Ray Lynch Jr

Because you want to use the Universally used Telerik grid control. Well I have a theory, all users always want Excel. If the software you are writing involves grids as the solution, it is probably never going to make anyone happy. It really is funny how grid centric a lot of big projects are, sad too. That said, Telerik Grid is fine. Just needs some intuition to interpret the documentation. Love their OnNeedsData event compared with the ASP.NET alternative. DevExpress is great for reporting, much better than Crystal and SSRS imho. So which one do you want to use depends on what you are doing. If you are just reporting and maybe want a gauge control, DevExpress wins for affordability and ease of use. If you want a grid to rule are grids to manage grids that show grids. Telerik.

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Septimus Hedgehog

For me, DevExpress. I believe that the SwiftPlotDiagram was implemented for our company because of the particular requirement to display multiple graphing lines in realtime. That meant not only the data and ability to scale the axes but it required fast throughput. That new type of graph then made it into the product release for everyone to use. I also recall, but can't prove it, that it took DE only two weeks or so to develop and ship to our company for testing. I joined the company about five months or so after the event. I've only used the graphing, data grid, some of the text editors and error components from what is a very comprehensive WinForms subset but they all worked very well, were quite easy to use and the support is 110% bang on the money and outstanding. Plus, their demo centre which shows everything in detail is worth paying for on its own but it's free by the way. I had used Telerik very lightly before the job I'm at now, and the only comparison I was able to make is the much hated ribbon controls. Ribbons are naff (thanks for nothing, Microsoft) but making the best of a miserable concept I'd split them 55/45 in favour of DevExpress. I can't compare anything else. DevExpress cater for just about all the bases. The ad hoc support via the DevExpress forums seemed to change for the worse in my opinion. Now, you log incidents and wait for someone in DevExpress' team to answer questions and they add them to the forums. In other words, you don't have users chiming in to threads like here. I might be wrong on the ad hoc support but they did change things quite radically a few months ago. I'm sure you can't go wrong with DevExpress or Telerik. Both come from dedicated companies. I'd be happy using either but I know and endorse DevExpress more because that's what I'm most familiar with. We also made heavy use of DevExpress' gauge controls. Those are an absolute success. I'd buy DevExpress just for those alone.

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Jeremy Hutchinson

I've used 2 control packages for WPF - Infragistics and DevExpress. I know you didn't ask about Infradistics, but I just want to say that their WPF stuff seemed like they didn't fully understand the power of WPF binding at the start. There were some real kludges after you got passed the easy stuff. I'm actually in the process of converting a project over from Infragistics to DevExpress. I find the controls from DevExpress much more intuitive, bug the big thing that sold me on DevExpress is the support. It has been phenomenal every time I have used it. They have been quick, knowledgeable and frequently provide a demo project to show you the working code in action. I haven't used 3rd party controls for WinForms or Web development for long enough that my opinions is there are probably invalid.

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Septimus Hedgehog

I didn't mention that but that too was my experience. Invariably, official tickets always came back with a sample attached. Sometimes, they took my code and checked it through and made recommendations or corrections.

"I do not have to forgive my enemies, I have had them all shot." — Ramón Maria Narváez (1800-68). "I don't need to shoot my enemies, I don't have any." - Me (2012).

Douglas Troy

I'm mainly asking because some of the guys here have limited experience with DevExpress but nothing with Telerik, and I have no experience with either, so I thought I'd ask around before we go and commit to one or the other, just to see what other devs had to say about them. As I just explained to a friend of mine that said I should just download the trials myself, while I am absolutely going to do that, sometimes it takes a good couple of months before you really find the problems/short comings, so I thought I would ask those that have already had experience using them. Thanks for the feedback Ennis, I appreciate it.

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Andy Brummer

I have used the Telerik asp.net controls. (grid, drop down, plus a few others) They helped the application cover a lot of ground quickly, however we have users all over the globe and their required javascript, css libraries, and the massive html they generated added a lot of extra overhead to our page load times. Also, I don't trust their design approach. Their controls try to handle every eventuality from the same component. For example their grid handled loading data from a wcf method on the client side, however to handle setting formatting on the server controls they generated all the html for the max number of rows regardless of how much data was displayed. Also if you changed from max 20 to max 100 results for example, the 80 extra rows didn't have proper formatting unless you did a page load. That is one of the many bugs that we submitted that they refused to fix and offered us Telerik points instead. I'd consider it a minor bug and if I was them I might not fix it myself, just because I'd go insane having to test all the potential configurations their components have to run under. If you are looking to get something out the door quickly and don't plan on straying too far from their examples they will save you time and look pretty good on top of it.

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Septimus Hedgehog

Jeremy Hutchinson wrote:

I've used 2 control packages for WPF - Infragistics and DevExpress.

A previous company I was at around 2006 used Infragistics. The four of us involved were sent on a training course for five days. It was nothing less than a typing competition. Too much time was spent attempting to do minor things. I'm not berating minor objectives but the emphasis was on having to use lots of code to "get there". I'm sure it's improved a lot over the years but back at the office we deprecated the use of Infragistics and reverted to using standard DotNet controls. There was also a problem with the way some of their controls looked. It was a little like buying a car where body panels didn't quite match. Still a car and it gets you from A to B but it didn't quite look right. Like I say, I'm sure they've improved things a lot since then.

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Brad Raulston

I have had subscriptions to both Telerik and DevExpress. I canceled my Devexpress subscription when they touted features that were then pulled from the release. I also had issues with the Silverlight controls and Prisim which at the time was a deal breaker. I switched to the Telerik Utlimate Collection and they have great support, I suggested a feature to JustTrace to allow tracing of Silverlight OOB apps and it was implemented as an internal build in less than a week. The other thing I like is the access to internal builds, especially nice when you identify a bug and they get it resolved before the next official release. Since I have access to the full Telerik suite I have used all but the Winforms controls and for Silverlight and WPF the controls provide a consistent programming interface which allows you to focus on implementation rather than documentation. To me Telerik is heads and shoulders above DevExpress in value and support.

Brad

Kunal Chowdhury IN

Hi Douglas, I tried both DevExpress, Infragistics and Telerik controls to evaluate some controls in one of my project. The project was in Silverlight, so definitely I tried the Silverlight controls for both of them. Among them I really liked the vast controls provided by Telerik. Their easy to customization steps and the support caught my eyes which I really appreciate. Infragistics is also a good component library but if you compare between them, you can easily score Telerik up. If your company is developing projects in major Microsoft Technologies like WinForm, WPF, ASP.NET, Silverlight, Windows Phone etc. you can go with the Telerik Ultimate license which will be cheap for you if you compare to individual product. You will also get quick and good response from the Telerik forum (from my experience) if you need any help as the forum is really very active. Not only this, there are many other products which again come with the same license. If you need a specific product too, you can go for it. I would highly recommend "Telerik" but that again depends on your actual requirement. Check out which product (Technology) you want to use and whether those libraries has those controls that you need in your project. You have to do some POC before selecting your library. I already did for one of my project and hence I have the experience with both of them. I did complete analysis for few months and then reported my higher management to use the Telerik controls only for our entire project. Hence my recommendation will still be there with Telerik. Last but not least, I am not recommending it as I am associated with them as Telerik MVP & Insider but from my previous experience. I am not a Telerik employee or has any direct association with any of those companies. This is my personal experience and faith on their controls. Let me know, if you have any queries.