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jQuery UI

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Kendo UI vs jQuery UI: What are the differences?

Introduction

Kendo UI and jQuery UI are two popular JavaScript frameworks that help developers create rich and interactive web applications. While both frameworks provide a wide range of UI components and support for various functionalities, there are several key differences between them.

  1. Architecture: Kendo UI is built on top of jQuery, which means that it leverages the functionality and performance optimizations provided by jQuery. This integration allows Kendo UI to have a smaller footprint and better performance compared to jQuery UI.

  2. Commercial vs Open-Source: Kendo UI is a commercial framework developed by Telerik and requires a paid license for certain features and support. On the other hand, jQuery UI is an open-source project maintained by the jQuery Foundation and is freely available for use.

  3. Component Variety: Kendo UI offers a wide range of pre-built UI components and widgets, including charts, grids, calendars, and more. jQuery UI, while also providing a set of UI components, has a more limited selection compared to Kendo UI.

  4. Customization and Theming: Kendo UI provides a higher level of customization and theming options out of the box. It offers a variety of themes and allows developers to easily modify the appearance and behavior of components. In contrast, jQuery UI has a more basic theming system and limited customization options.

  5. Mobile Support: Kendo UI is designed with mobile-friendly features and responsive design in mind. It offers a set of mobile UI components and provides seamless integration with popular mobile frameworks like Apache Cordova (PhoneGap). jQuery UI, while it can be used in mobile applications, does not have the same level of mobile-specific features and optimizations as Kendo UI.

  6. Documentation and Support: Kendo UI has extensive documentation and a dedicated support team, providing resources and assistance to developers. It also offers official training and certification programs. jQuery UI, being an open-source project, has documentation and community support but may not have the same level of official support and resources as Kendo UI.

In summary, Kendo UI and jQuery UI have key differences in terms of architecture, commercial vs open-source nature, component variety, customization and theming options, mobile support, and documentation/support resources.

Decisions about jQuery UI and Kendo UI
James Bender
Lead Application Architect at TekPartners · | 4 upvotes · 15.9K views

Full disclosure; I worked for both Telerik and Infragistics in Developer Relations for these projects. From my point of view, neither is a clear "winner" in this space. Kendo has some nice features and Ignite doesn't have and vice versa. We ended up picking Kendo because we needed to settle on one of these, and most of our clients already owned Kendo because it came with some other Telerik product. That's it. It could have very easily gone the other way, but Telerik kinda won the ground war here, so...

Having said that, the only tool we really use is the grid (the rest of them are no better than Flowbite/HTML5/etc. controls. And even then, we really need to be leveraging the advanced functionality of the grid before telling the client they'll have to buy a support license.

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Pros of jQuery UI
Pros of Kendo UI
  • 215
    Ui components
  • 156
    Cross-browser
  • 121
    Easy
  • 100
    It's jquery
  • 81
    Open source
  • 57
    Widgets
  • 48
    Plugins
  • 46
    Popular
  • 39
    Datepicker
  • 23
    Great community
  • 7
    DOM Manipulation
  • 6
    Themes
  • 0
    Some good ui components
  • 15
    Collection of controls
  • 5
    Speed
  • 4
    Multi-framework support
  • 4
    Mobile
  • 2
    AngularJS
  • 2
    Built-in router
  • 1
    Good Documentation

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Cons of jQuery UI
Cons of Kendo UI
  • 1
    Does not contain charts or graphs
  • 4
    Massive footprint
  • 3
    Slow
  • 1
    Awdawd
  • 1
    Spotty Documentation
  • 1
    Expensive
  • 1
    Poor customizability

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What is jQuery UI?

Whether you're building highly interactive web applications or you just need to add a date picker to a form control, jQuery UI is the perfect choice.

What is Kendo UI?

Fast, light, complete: 70+ jQuery-based UI widgets in one powerful toolset. AngularJS integration, Bootstrap support, mobile controls, offline data solution.

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What companies use jQuery UI?
What companies use Kendo UI?
See which teams inside your own company are using jQuery UI or Kendo UI.
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What tools integrate with jQuery UI?
What tools integrate with Kendo UI?
What are some alternatives to jQuery UI and Kendo UI?
Bootstrap
Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.
jQuery
jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.
React
Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.
jQuery Mobile
jQuery Mobile is a HTML5-based user interface system designed to make responsive web sites and apps that are accessible on all smartphone, tablet and desktop devices.
AngularJS
AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.
See all alternatives