How do people feel about Telerik Kendo UI?

[medin]

The company I work at bought Telerik Kendo UI and we've been using it for a couple of months now. After spending many weeks working with this product, I'm curious to take a read on how other people feel about it. Note I've only ever used Bootstrap, Ionic, and other open source frameworks prior to this.

From what I can tell:

Pros:

• Builds awesome UI with very minimal design effort

• Works incredibly well with entity framework back end

• Handles data view related logic internally and requires minimal effort

Cons:

• Obfuscated source code due to not being open source, means it's impossible to figure out what the hell it's doing

• Workarounds are a pain in the ass

• They do horribly sadistic things to markup and CSS

• Documentation is terrible, often omitting example code, or contextual code

So all that said, how do you guys feel about Kendo UI?

[Tim]

I completely agree with your observations, the Vue product especially feels very half baked.

It's slick enough and feature complete to get you hooked and 80% of what you need out of the box, which draws you in. And then that last 20% becomes such a convoluted nightmare the shine of the initial 80% starts to fade quickly.

I do have to say though, their support has been very responsive, and extremely helpful. It does hurt a little that I was sold a product that cannot handle advanced functionality without getting a support person to show you the complex steps to what should/could be much more simple (or in the documentation) and charge for that support.

I would say if you can use the components as is, and you don't need to do anything more tan what you see in the demo's it's 100% a great product, but I would be very wary of seeing them as a starting point and expecting you can build off of them easily.

[Petar]

Hi Мedin,

Thank you for the positive feedback regarding the "Pros" list about the Telerik Kendo UI products. 

Talking about the "Cons" listed in your post: 

• Source code - the source code of most of the Kendo UI products can be downloaded when you are a commercial-license holder.
• Workarounds - when there are any issues with one of our components we are doing our best to fix the issue as fast as possible. I can agree that in more complex scenarios a suggested workaround could be more complicated but this is because of scenarios' specifics. And last but not least, the good thing is that in some scenarios we can provide a workaround rather than making the clients wait for the fix. 
• Markup and CSS - can you please give more details here? Maybe it is the current time to mention that with our last release in January, there are some breaking changes introduced in some of our components. The breaking changes are related to a new rendering in part of our components. What I am saying here is that we are constantly improving our components, even in terms of Markup and CSS
• Documentation quality - I can agree that there are always places for improvements in the documentation. However, we are constantly updating it, based on the feedback provided by our clients. Our documentation focuses on the main scenarios of a given component. When there is something that is not documented, you can always submit a support ticket and ask us for help.

I hope the above gives a wider perspective about the bullets that you listed. We are always open to your constructive feedback about what we can improve in our products, documentation, or support service. If you have something specific to share, we will be happy to hear and discuss it. 

Regards,
Petar
Progress Telerik

[Petar]

Hi Tim,

Thank you for your constructive feedback. Customers' opinions like yours are always positive of the proper product development. 

I can agree with you that we have a lot to improve in our documentation. There are many specific scenarios with the different components which can be useful for our clients but they are not available as demos. 

I can say that the reason for the gaps in the documentation is that we are focused on the development of the new components we want to provide(Currently we have 80+ Native components and functionalities/packages related to their usage). This, of course, doesn't excuse us for the missing demos for the different components. We are prioritizing the new components to the more detailed documentation but, as shared in your post, maybe this is not the proper approach. It is in our plans to focus our efforts on providing more complex scenarios that will be available either as a part of the documentation or as knowledge base articles.  

I believe that when we complete our task of providing more specific examples, we will raise your product satisfaction to 100%. 

Last but not least, thank you for the positive feedback about our support. I am happy to hear that we've covered your expectations and provided a quality service. We are always striving to put ourselves in the clients' shoes and try to give them the best possible solution we can provide for their scenario. You can continue to rely on us for any questions about the Kendo UI for Vue suite. 

If you have other suggestions which can improve the user experience when working with the Kendo UI for Vue suite, we will be happy to hear them.

Regards,
Petar
Progress Telerik