It seems that there are many third-party .NET WinForms grids available on the market. I have seen Syncfusion, Xceed, and Infragistics in use at various companies, but now need to choose one for my own use and can't find objective information.
My priorities are ease of use, hierarchical capabilities (i.e. ability to drill down on a row and show contained data), and overall similarity to Excel in terms of user experience.
Can anyone recommend a good option and explain why they favor it?
I know that Syncfusion is used heavily on Wall St. because of it's similarity to Excel. Also, Resolver One uses Syncfusion as it's grid, so it seems to be regarded as truly production-quality.
Just going to recommend staying away from Infragistics. We used their control toolkit in our website for a while, but every update seemed to get slower and buggier. If I remember correctly we also had trouble getting a lot of controls to work correctly with standard ASP.NET AJAX stuff.
You didn't mention Telerik, which has a pretty decent control set. You may want to check them out as well. It's what we're replacing the Infragistics controls with.
Sorry I can't speak about the grids themselves much, as I've not needed to use them yet.
I have found myself very happy with the XtraGrid from DevExpress
Update: I should have said that I find XtraGrid very versatile and backed by a very active community over at the DevExpress Forums. Specifically the XtraGrid forum is here
Also Available is DevExpress' PivotGrid for extreme drill down capabilities
another vote for syncfusion. Used it on a project recently. I was happy with the functionality and found it easy to integrate into the project.
We have phenomenal good fortune with the Infragistics UltraWinDataGrid (for WinForms). It allows us to do a lot of dynamic data work at the end user level, just by dragging and dropping. We get grouping based on columns just by dragging a column up to the top of the control, and get aggregate information very easily.
The one complaint is if you are doing heavily multi-threaded updates (we're talking 300+/sec), you may get the control to wig out. Most people won't use the control as heavily as we do that way.
You can try VIBlend SuperGridView. It has hierarchical capabilities and you can drill down on rows and columns. The use experience is very similar to Excel.
I've used infragistics in the past, but please don't let that be a recommendation. While they have a lot of functionality, they are difficult to navigate through the endless amounts of properties. Also, they don't have very good support.
ComponentOne has a problematic grid that does not support virtual mode the way one would expect one to.
We used Syncfusion extensively on our last project. They have a GridControl which is extremely powerful - and a 'Grouping' Grid Control which has some of the best built-in features of any grid out there. Yes - there is a bit of a learning curve - and given the huge number of features, there are known bugs (we had a performance issue with the TreeViewControl - but Syncfusion was aware of it and addressed it in a patch). I recently blogged about a comparison (mainly performance comparison) of Syncfusion's grid Control versus the WinForms datagridview - in case you're interested.
Try our PFGrid.NET, it's extremely flexible and you can use Grid- and TreeList-mode. The renderers are very powerful.
Telerik has a great offering called RadGridView for WinForms, part of their WinForms control suite.