I am looking for input from users who have worked with either the Devexpress controls or Telerik controls for ASP.NET
They both seem like they would do what i neeed, however opinions from people who have used either one would greatly help me to make this choice.
Thanks
When I developed in ASP.NET, I used both, and have been a long time fan of DevExpress, not just their components but their support and general commitment to excellence. I found the Telerik components somewhat, well, slapdash in comparison. Telerik has broader offering, so they'll have components that DevExpress doesn't.
I think DevExpress seem to be higher quality but one problem I had with evaluation of the DevExpress controls was that some of them seem to require you to also use their own ORM to get the advanced features.
I am really interested to know more about the DevExpress controls. Haven't tried them yet.
I use Telerik components for a year and a half. Mostly ASP.NET and Reporting package, and recently the Grid for WinForms. Telerik releases new versions almost every quarter (almost 4 times a year). They have a lot of bugs, and fix a lot of bugs, and put a lot of new bugs, and in the process sometimes break existing code, or it does not work as it worked before, so requires fixing. For me upgrading to new version takes precious time away from real development work. Having a lot of issues which result from poor documentation and quirky behavior of components is not really helped much by their good support. It would be far better if they devote more resources to making a better product, so there would not be any issues to work out, any bugs to report. And they always ask for you to send them a sample application even if it's a very simple and obvious thing (like they are lazy to try to make a repro project themselves?). Customers should not be used as beta testers or debugging engineers!!!
And there is so much praise in some forum posts on the web, that it looks totally like advertising and not comments from real people. I guess that can be said of almost all 3rd party component vendors.
We use the Telerik components, for doing asp.net for the most part they work well, but it seems that they want to dumb down everything and I don't like how they try to force you to do everything from the mark up side, the support for doing things programmaticlly is lacking. I get the feeling that they want people to just use the designer and do drag and drop development.
Played with there ORM a little, wasn't real impressed, there claims about Linq support where over stated, I couldn't even do a select against multiple tables with it, linq to SQL gives me that.
For a canned UI component solution there not bad, there stuff works fairly well, just wish it had a little more back end support.
Similar question at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/169357/net-usercontrols-telerik-devexpress-infragistics-componentone-whos-best
I posted it and ended up going with DevExpress I was interested in both ASP.NET and winforms development. I downloaded the trials of Telerik and DevExpress as these two seem to be the most widely used. I much preferred the DevExpress controls they seemed more logical to use and allowed more options and customization. I have done project upgrades with no issues and their support is excellent.
I used Developer Express .net controls but got rid of them and have just started using Telerik. I can't speak for Telerik as of now but I was not fond of Developer Express' .Net components. That being said, their Delphi components are awesome.
When I purchased DevExpress' .Net components, I had researched many components and their reviews and Telerik and DevExpress were high on my list. I chose DevExpress for two reasons. One, I had previously used their Delphi grid and it was great, and two, they had many more features within their component suite than Telerik.
Unfortunately, the fact that they have many more features only means that they have more code to support and more bugs to fix. A previous poster complained about Telerik's release dates. I can tell you that the same problem exists with DevExpress but their releases fall more frequently than per quarter. DevExpress' marketing scheme is to continually add new functionality and gadgets. However, their frequent releases only adds more bugs to their code. It was exciting to have bug fixes released on a frequent basis but in reality, the new functionality that they on top of the bug fixes broke other things.
I was constantly having to rewrite code blocks because either function parameters changed or were deprecated. Their support was just o.k. but not anything phenominal. I got frustrated with one support tech because I wanted to know how to color a grid cell for field validation. He actually argued with me and tried to convince me to use a label to input my error messages into--this didn't even answer my question and wasn't what I wanted. Finally, I got him to answer my question and found a way to do it but it was like pulling teeth.
My biggest beef with them is that I had four projects that used their grids and one of those projects used their reporting feature. The amount of bugs that they had in their (asp.net) grids forced me to scrap them and use asp.net's gridview instead. I was hoping to salvage the reporting feature but that had a bug in it as well. I fixed the bug in their report code, reported the problem and gave them the solution, and they basically denied that it was a problem. However, my fix was in their next release without even a thank you.
I am now onto Telerik using winforms for a quick project. It's been easy thus far. I've used their panels, tab control, and soon their grid. I'd use WPF but there's a learning curve with WPF and it's something I'll have to get to later.
Good Luck.
DevExpress or Telerik; a difficult decision for a company to be made. If you prefer cosmetics, telerik has plus point and if you need functionality with performance then go with DevExpress.
Telerik performance is also poor( please visit http://visualwebgui.com/Gizmox/Technology/Performance/tabid/625/Default.aspx) whereas DevExpress ASPxGrid offers best performance in industry. DevExpress Code Central, Documentation, Tutorials and Support is excellent.
I've used DevExpress' WinForms controls for just over 2 years now and am very happy with them. Both the controls and the support are first class. Moving to ASP.NET development though, or more specifically ASP.NET MVC, I found both to be completely inadequate. I played with obout a bit but didn't live up to expectations. Telerik's MVC controls do exactly what I need and provide plenty of flexibility for down the line without forcing me to use it right now. I guess the story might be different for non-MVC ASP.NET applications but for MVC apps, Telerik gets my vote as without equal at the moment.
I've been using DevExpress components for 4 months now, for both Winforms and ASP.NET. Winforms side is their actual strength, having long years experience with Delphi components before. For ASP.NET grid, they provide most of the Winform grid functionality. I have yet tested it for middle-sized projects and I can say it's satisfying in terms of ability and performance. DevExpress package also includes a ProjectConverter utility that upgrades your projects when you install quarterly updates, which I've found very useful so far.
I've seen Telerik used by software companies working on large projects. Although I haven't used them as a developer myself, I've tested applications using Telerik components. It's also a reasonable choice with nice components, with slightly worse performance albeit. From a testing point-of-view, Telerik provides special support for WebAii testing (which I also appreciate) as an upside.
One last cent here. Beware of the one-sided forum comments as Dragoljub put. For example you can see Mr. Kevin Babcock here fiercely defending Telerik components, but never mentioning he worked (maybe is still working) for Telerik. His intention might not necessarily be bad, however I see a strong bias (as in "They are usually known to provide the best product support across all UI vendors." --talking of Telerik).
Hate the short licensing period for Telerik. I am stuck with numerous bugs with no way to fix, since i can't get updated versions anymore. Why can't the offer patches for free and make new functionality/components upgrade costs. For the amount of money it costs, you think you'd get better. Also, I doubt the controls have saved me anytime. If anything, it's cost me more time to figure out how to get them to run properly. I do like some of the controls like the grid and editor, but they are bloated with options and the performance is so-so.
I used both - but finally ended using telerik. One the one hand there is a "get used to it" but on the other hand are two things: a.) I also had to get used to DevEx.. b.) As soon as you got used to it - WPF controls, WinForm Controls and Silverlight Controls share the same "logic"
And last not least I did a lot of WPF / Silverlight projects sharing the same code. So from my point of view telerik rules.
Last not least - my final decission to stay with telerik was their outstanding support. Even with the trials I got answers in their forums. And not RTFM answers - most of the time there is a snippet or even a little working solution.
In reply to the comments about performance, I have to agree with Todd. Thanks to the client side binding available in the Telerik components, we've been able to seriously supercharge all our web based applications.
Hello, I have also worked with both DevExpress and Telerik controls. When it comes to Telerik, you have to look at both their: - Rich set of controls - Extraordinary support system they have
Bottom line, you will benefit from the controls at the same time ask any question and get helped in any issue you might face.
Thank you, Regards
I've just started a new ASP.NET application and tried Telerik first but switched to DevExpress after a few days. We haven't purchased either yet but DevExpress is looking very good.
We needed a three level hierarchical grid. The Telerik grid worked well and looked great when used in it's default mode. This mode puts all the data into ViewState which means that ViewState can get huge which I wasn't comfortable with. You can turn ViewState off and most things work except that it doesn't remember which rows are expanded. They have some (poorly written IMHO) examples on how to manage that yourself which is not hard to do but then I started getting weird errors with the inner grid's paging buttons not working properly etc with ViewState off. The Telerik site has examples on how to put ViewState into Session instead but that has its own set of problems.
After fighting for a few days, I tried the DevExpress grid and that felt like a breath of fresh air. It does not put the data in ViewState. So far the grid and some other DevExpress controls have been working very smoothly.
Of course without the data in ViewState you need to manage your own caching if you don't want to hit the data source every time you go to the next page or whatever.
Edit: I just learned that the DevExpress grid caches the data in server memory so your data source doesn't get hit every time as I thought. This can be turned off with the EnableRowsCache property. I'm already caching with the ASP.NET cache so I've turned this off.
In summary, it's easy to be tempted by Telerik's big name and stunning demos but I found the DevExpress products easily to use and have a cleaner feel about them. Apologies to Telerik if I missed something or didn't persevere long enough but I just felt that what little hair I have left is going to last longer with DevExpress.
I know that's a very adhoc narrow review. You really need to try both in some test applications.
I was a fan of Telerik until I tried to uninstall their trials. It left junk everywhere in the file system and registry.
With a bit of luck their forum may solve it. Otherwise it may have to be format c:
Never again.