Check out some of our favorite submissions from this event, and get inspired by the incredible range of everything it’s possible to create with KendoReact!
In our recent DEV.to Kendo React Free Components Challenge, we invited hackathon participants to build an app that included at least 10 Progress KendoReact Free components. Then, to sweeten the deal a little, we added additional prizes for submissions that integrated our new Progress Agentic RAG technology or used the AI Coding Assistants to help create their work. Participants were competing to win one of three $1000 prizes: “Build Without Boundaries,” “RAGs to Riches” or “Code Smarter, Not Harder.”
During the challenge window (September 10-28, 2025) more than 70 entries were submitted. Folks built some creative and amazing apps with our components: project management dashboards, personal finance trackers, weather apps, CV builders and even several games!
If you haven’t had a chance yet, I highly encourage you to check out all the entries and the incredible things our participants built. Even with such a small window of time, the Kendo UI tools enabled our participants to make some truly impressive applications.
In fact … we’re launching a brand new Built With KendoReact showcase, just to show them off! It includes some of our favorite submissions from this event, so you can be inspired by the incredible range of everything it’s possible to create! We’ll keep adding to it in the future to share the best of what our community is making with KendoReact.
The entries were all so good that it made it especially hard to choose winners for this event, but, unfortunately, we couldn’t give everyone a prize. Here are our top three, who really went above and beyond the challenge in each category:
Thank you so much to everyone who participated! It was genuinely a blast to explore your brilliant ideas—and I hope you had just as much fun making them!
As a reminder, the KendoReact Free library is just that—free! If you want to try your hand at building a React app, this suite of free UI components can speed up that process. And you can use them all the way through production without a license.
Kathryn Grayson Nanz is a developer advocate at Progress with a passion for React, UI and design and sharing with the community. She started her career as a graphic designer and was told by her Creative Director to never let anyone find out she could code because she’d be stuck doing it forever. She ignored his warning and has never been happier. You can find her writing, blogging, streaming and tweeting about React, design, UI and more. You can find her at @kathryngrayson on Twitter.