Devexpress or Telerik Controls comparison
I am looking into purchasing either dev express or telerik to aid in the development of our applications.
We are mainly an asp.net outfit but we are starting to make more and more use of silverlight and mvc.
I would like to know what people have thought about:
- Feature set
- Ease of use
- Documentation
- Pricing and Licensing
Answer
Just to set the tone here: I work for Telerik and am involved with their ASP.NET (AJAX and MVC) as well as XAML products so keep that in mind :)
Since both companies suites tend to be fairly similar I highly recommend trying both of them out. Generally when I try out a 3rd party vendor I try to do the following:
- Check out the features of the controls
- Use their Documentation and Examples
- Check out the community (forums)
- Try out support (submit a ticket just to see the kind of response I get)
Usually after this I have a pretty good idea whether or not I like the product or not!
As for Telerik-specific items I'll keep to the categories you mentioned to make it easier :)
Feature set
Since you mentioned that you're interested in ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight I say look over our demo pages and see what we offer. Every demo has the source code listed on the page (for ASP.NET products it's below the actual demo, for Silverlight there's a "Code" button in the upper right-hand corner of the demo). This will give you an idea of the features, as well as the code that goes into the controls.
Ease of use
Whenever I get feedback from any of our customers they almost always mention how quick and easy it is to get started with our controls. However, what one person thinks is easy an intuitive might not be the case for another, so I say try out the components and see what you think! :D
Documentation
Our documentation is full of examples and more detailed information about the controls. Again, I definitely recommend using the documentation for the products to see what you think:
Pricing and Licensing
Our license is on a per-developer basis, with no royalty fees or anything like that for distribution. We try to make your life as easy as possible, and if you're working on a team where multiple people come in and out of the team we have the ability for you to transfer a license to a new individual coming in on the team.
Since you are looking at three products I highly recommend looking into the Premium Collection or even Ultimate Collection (for a full list of what's included, see this page) since you get quite a deal on these packages.
Also, our trials are fully functional and do not expire (only a trial message pops up once in a while) so feel free to use and abuse the components to your hearts content!
So that's it for my wall of text, good luck with the evaluation!