Component Discussions

Re: Infragistics Vs Telerik

luker459 — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:43:32 GMT

I have been using infragistics controls (NetAdvantage) for roughly 7 or 8 years (particularly the asp.net controls - we abandoned the ultrawingrid because it stopped supporting unbound mode).

My opinion of them is that they are absolute CRAP. I honestly dont know why people rank them so highly. They are completely full of bugs for starters. I couldnt possibly recommend them any less and the only reason we stay with them is because we dont want to spend time redeveloping with new controls.

Their support is hopeless. Their controls are missing common sense functionality (the amount of times i've looked for an event and not found it, or done testing to establish under what circumstances it is raised and just thought to myself "You bunch of idiots. Who designs this stuff?"). As it happens, right now i am trying in vain to get to the bottom of a weird bug. It happens intermittently by users of our side, and the stack trace indicates an error within some internal function of the webgrid control - but as with infragistics support, unless you can provide a sample project to reproduce a bug then you're on your own.

I recently battled with memory issues because of an absolutely ridiculous design decision by infragistics (more details here http://subjectively.blogspot.com/2009/03/importance-of-recycling-memory.html).

Quite honestly infragistics are the bane of my existence as a developer, and when the day comes where we can finally abandon them in favour of another supplier will be a truly great day.

Re: Infragistics Vs Telerik

tymberwyld — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:25:36 GMT

Look, I will say this. I have used Telerik, Infragistics and even DevExpress for 5+ years. DevExpress by far is more stable and has a smaller footprint. It's unfortunate that a lot of these 3rd party controls still won't get away from rendering everything in html tables (sure, for grids it's necessary). DevExpress does a lot of work for you, and if you happen to need to override it, they give more hooks into events than I have ever found from any 3rd party suite. There may be 1 or 2 controls which they don't have (an AspxSplitter or Docking), but who really uses that stuff a lot? They constantly come out with more controls and have patches every 1 - 2 months so you always have bug fixes as fast as possible (and there is rarely an occasion where a work around isn't possible). They're support is awesome as well as the community blogs. I have been using their recent version (8.2) for over a year and it's very nice! It definately a serious competitor to Telerik and Infragistics and I will probably stick with them.

Re: Infragistics Vs Telerik

dick_lampard — Wed, 14 May 2008 06:16:05 GMT

Dave, I think that your comparison table is rather outdated concerning the Telerik part. I evaluated both vendors recently and although Telerik do not have clent-side insert/update (they have client delete though) or Excel copy/paste, I find their grid control much faster, robust and easy to be configured, yet with powerful features (like detail templates or row drag and drop). Besides, their online demos/docs/kb articles are quite comprehensive and descriptive and judging from the activity in the public forums the support service supersedes Infragistics'. One more thing that I found is Telerik has code library section on their site which is a valuable resource for custom solutions.

You may be interested in updating your table data or compare Infra and Telerik again.

Re: Infragistics Vs Telerik

davidlars99 — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:52:02 GMT

Here's my two cents...

Feature

Infragistics

Telerik

Comments

Filtering

Paging

Sorting

Cell Search

Excel like Filtering

Export PDF

Not available in the current version we have

In Line Editing

Insert / Edit Templates

Infragistics Row Template looks good

AJAX

Hierarchical

Excel Copy paste

This features allows to directly Copy from Excel and paste in Grid

Row Auto Numbering and Re-numbering at Client Side

Fixed Add Row (Client Side)

Client API

Rich

Moderate

Column Footers

Column Formatting

Client Side Row Add

Documentation

Moderate

Poor

Samples

Moderate

Good

Learning Curve

Difficult to Understand

Easy to Understand

Infragistics Minus Points

Infragistics doesn't have a splitter control.
Infragistics creates a ridiculous amount of code in HTML. For similar functionality, we might have a few hundred lines of extra code compared to Telerik.
Infragistics offers training classes to use their controls. If you need training to use these components, then you're in trouble!

Telerik Minus Points

Less features in some controls... Especially in Grid.

Poor Documentation

Re: Infragistics Vs Telerik

rtortima — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 14:39:10 GMT

What about the devexpress suite for grids, menus, text and comboboxes? Have you ever tried one of those?

Might be a worthy experience to use some of these controls, specially the webgrid...though Telerik grid seems to work great as well, Dev grid looked even faster (might be luck or my local configuration :) )

Re: Infragistics Vs Telerik

s2k — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 20:08:31 GMT

How do the telerik controls compare to Infragistics in terms of web delpoyment, do they all support medium trust?

In terms of actual size they product on the resulting webpage, do the telrik controls produce a smaller page and lighter on javascript? We use the INFragistics controsl but find them very heavy on a web page. We are lookign to possibly switch but not sure how much better telerik might be.

Re: Infragistics Vs Telerik

EdBlankenship — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 16:21:35 GMT

I have been spending some time comparing the major component suites out there... I have a pretty extensive blog post already about this topic: http://www.edsquared.com/2006/12/05/ThirdParty+NET+Component+Suite+Comparison.aspx

It should also be noted that if you are going to be selecting a component suite that you have to take into consideration other controls (like Windows Forms controls) that are included. Infragistics has always had Windows Forms controls and Telerik has just released their new component suite product line... Just another consideration when making your evaluation if you will be doing other than ASP.NET development.

Re: Infragistics Vs Telerik

PeterBrunone — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 18:11:34 GMT

If you have any more questions, please IM. I'd kind of like to keep this thread on the main topic if possible.

Understandable. Sorry for pulling things off course, but when I read your previous post, I had to ask for more details. Thank you for taking the time to explain; your concerns as laid out here are excellent material for any component discussion, and certainly valuable to this thread as well for anyone who hasn't delved that deeply into the aforementioned product suites.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled topic.

Re: Infragistics Vs Telerik

kkfrost — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 13:34:33 GMT

I'm an independent software consultant. When I purchase something I want it to be relatively stable and feature rich when I purchase it. The more customers you get the more websites you have to manage and maintain. Before the latest release with Telerik, I believe you had to create a rad virtual directory for each project. They have addressed that but you still have the bin directories to contend with. I've got dev servers with 40 to 50 + different projects on them. Then the customers servers, it's not ideal to have to change or upgrade every 3 months. Having said that hopefully the choice to upgrade is whether or not the new releases have functionality you may need. Which might not be as likely to lead you to have to upgrade everything.

Also, some of the fixes have been to copy this fix here, extract and copy the contents to this or that directory which isn't ideal.

What I'm getting at is the way these things are upgraded constantly and some times it's to fix bugs, it looks like it could turn into area to introduce a new "dll H*LL". With the built in Visual Studio controls, I think I've ran into a scenario to where I had to roll out 1 hotfix and that wasn't control related it was a asp.net bug. (I'm sure others will chime in that they've had to do more.)

Again, to some extent upgrading and fixing is the nature of the business. Still doesn't mean I'm fond of introducing another element to my enviroments if I don't have too. Plus when you do consulting work customers pay you by the hour on, the small and medium sized business don't take kindly sometimes paying you to do maintenance work, sure there are managed service contracts but still a lot do not like it. They don't want to pay you good money to write a product for them and then have to pay every 3 months to upgrade it. (A lot won't so the 3 months upgrades sometimes you end up eating your of your own pocket if you want to keep the customer.) So it's another reason that I consider before rolling out a third party control. At present, I have them in 3 environments, the others I make do with the built in stuff.

Also, in closing, I think this might should be a discussion for another thread. As I've mentioned previously, if you work for a large company where you might manage 3, 6 or 10 websites internally and your daily job is to solely focus on development in the same areas, these things I've mentioned may not be a concern for you. I mention them not to start a debate but to make sure the persons reading this think about it and make the decision for themselves as to whether it might be an issue for them.

For me when consulting and one day Imight be creating a stand alone app, the next you're integrating with CRM, the next Project server, etc etc. So these third party controls for me I want to be elegant and simple to use. I don't want to spend 3 days in documentation learning how to use them, if I do then I'll just figure out how to accomplish what I need with built in controls. Then as mentioned I don't want something that I have to upgrade every 3 months. Now if the controls come up with some method that does automatic updates with rollback capabilities, then it's a different story. :) Or even automated installations that you can script to update dev machines as well as servers, it could be nicer but I don't see that from anybody.

If you have any more questions, please IM. I'd kind of like to keep this thread on the main topic if possible.

Thanks.

Re: Infragistics Vs Telerik

PeterBrunone — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 05:32:36 GMT

kkfrost:
3) This is not just telerik but any third party controls. I'm not too sure I'm fond of the quarterly roll outs in my field because I work with a lot of different customers. So as the amount of customers grow, maintaining another set of files on servers is just an added burden.

As another third-party control vendor, I'm curious as to what exactly you're getting at here (good feedback is hard to find, and when I get it, I like to make sure I understand it). Forgive me if I'm just being dense -- it's been a long weekend -- but would you mind unpacking this a bit?

Cheers,

Re: Infragistics Vs Telerik

kkfrost — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 14:13:12 GMT

Good luck falconsoft. There is one caveat I wanted to reply in your response. "I liked your suggestion of first trying to use the available ASP.NET controls and Atlas stuff"

I started looking into the Atlas stuff back in July. I purchased a book and started going through it. After a couple of hours it was clear that "Atlas" had changed quite a bit so I bagged it. With that said, I'm not sure I would use atlas controls in production stuff until it releases. (Rumor has it sometime in Dec but I'm not sure.) For me I can't afford things to use things that i know before hand are going to change. So if you use atlas right now, understand it's beta and things could change and break your existing code when the release comes out.

My suggestion for right now would be to look at it to see if might meet your needs because you can't be the price. :) Then if you aren't in a super hurry for a solution and can't wait a until the release then it may be a viable option.

Having said that I understand everybody's situations are different. If you work for a company and are dedicated to one large product that you get to focus on then the changes may not be as big a deal as they are for me.

Thanks for the posts. Also, as you mentioned please post your comments about the Telerik when you get the chance.

Re: Infragistics Vs Telerik

falconsoft — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 13:11:14 GMT

Hi kkfrost,

Thanks for your detailed and helpful reply. Your comments in this forum thread have been very useful.

I am trying out Telerik currently (I spent 3-4 days on evaluating Infragistic too). I thought that I would make few sample pages and see for myself.

Regarding the viewstate- I found that many times for the controls we are not actually using ViewState and so can disable it. On disabling it, say for grid control, then the viewstate size reduces dramatically. I noticed this for Telerik and Infragistic for the grid control samples. I have seen this for the html source coming to client- I am not sure whether this applies for the backend Ajax calls too. I am sure you would have already tried this.

I liked your suggestion of first trying to use the available ASP.NET controls and Atlas stuff and only if not available here use third-party controls. That seems to be the way to go. Thanks!

I will put by findings\experiences with Telerik in a few weeks.

Thanks!

Re: Infragistics Vs Telerik

kkfrost — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 16:11:57 GMT

Hello,

Yes I'm using the Q3 2006 product. My thoughts on the controls are a couple.

1) Most important thing I would consider is your support needs. Telerik has a great group of personnel and will answer just about anything to help you out. But the biggest thing is their turn around time. If you can live with email support with a 24 hour turn around time, then there won't be a concern there. One thing I will add, because email can be a painstaking vehicle when you're in a crunch, I find it actually takes two or three times to get the right answer. Not by any fault of Telerik's support capabilities but more so the fact of the time difference and it's hard to sometimes to get on the same page in email the first try.

If you send something at 5pm est then you get a response early the next morning and if you and the person responding aren't on the same page, then it'll be at least another day because of the time difference. However, if you change your work schedule and interface at say 5 am est, if they aren't busy you'll have a couple of hours to go back and forth. They had mentioned they were working on IM and phone support for US hours so if they get that ironned out, I think it would be tremendous.

2) I'm starting to warm up to the Ajax Manager. I haven't gotten into any really cutting edge scenarios with it but would have to say so far it works as advertised. I like the Rad:Grid as well as the combo box. I've started playing with the tabstrip and am pleased.

I am starting a contract with a company that uses the controls extensively. I haven't verified but two concerns they've ran across are the size the viewstate gets when using the controls as well as the way "ajaxifications" send the entire view state back and forth across the wire which as you can imagine can tie into performance issues in certain scenarios. (To Telerik's credit, I'm not sure Atlas does things any different. Can't speak for Infragistics)

3) This is not just telerik but any third party controls. I'm not too sure I'm fond of the quarterly roll outs in my field because I work with a lot of different customers. So as the amount of customers grow, maintaining another set of files on servers is just an added burden. I find that my mentality for the most part is to try and figure out a way to use a built in asp:net control first and then if I come into something challenging, I try to figure out which gives me the best avenue to acheive what I want most efficiently. For example, if I need hiearchical grid, or a grid with a another control in a column, then I use the rad:grid. A combo box that uses type ahead rad. For basic stuff. asp.net.

4) Think about "Atlas", if you're just looking for a way to "ajaxify" things to my knowledge MS is supposed to be releasing ajax for asp.Net in the december time frame. In my opinion it will severly curb the price of all of these suites when they get competition from a large mass produced product. When the competition stiffens in these arenas, I could really see these suites priced in the $200 price range but at that price, the support structure changed to where support calls are $50 a piece or something. (I don't pretend to know the cost or the business processes of these companies, but when I can buy Visual Studio for the same price of one of these suites, personally I would get the same value for $799. Plus with atlas being free and once all these great savvy developers start posting how to examples, things for these couple of companies I would imagine will have to change.)

In summary, I think the Telerik product is a good product and if you look at the examples on their website and by looking at them you think they will cover all your needs as well as you not ever having the need to have critical problems to where you need a support contact on the phone, then go for it. Also,to me it seems a lot of Teleriks customers are businesses to where they are maintaining one or two web servers. So my comments of maintaining files wouldn't be that big of an issue. But if you are a independent consultant with hundreds of different servers in different environments then you know what you're getting into with the maintenance.

They are really great to work with and are flexible so if you have concerns I will say with 100% confidence that they will work with you to try and accomodate your needs if anyway possible.

Hope that helps and good luck with your choice.

Re: Infragistics Vs Telerik

falconsoft — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 06:23:00 GMT

Hi,

I need to make the same decision- Telerik or Infragistics and found this thread to be quite useful. You have very painstakingly put down things in detail.

Can you share your present experience- I mean, after using Telerik were you able to build the web application you wanted? Do you yet think it was the right choice?

Their current version is RadControls Q3 2006 SP2. Are you using the same one?

Thanks!

Re: Infragistics Vs Telerik

BitShift — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 16:59:16 GMT

misuk11:
Does anyone use the Telerik set of controls ? Ive been using Infragistics for a while and to be honest theyre rubbish ! The visual designers dont work properly, setting layouts causes endless problems. Ive spent hours trying to figure out why when I set a tab control layout in designer, it appears completely differently at runtime. I have to wait days for answers to problems, when they issue updates, this causes existing fuinctioality to break, the list goes on and on. Im thinking of buying the Telerik set, has anyone used them ?

I just found this thread with a search of "infragistics vs telerik" and ive been in the same boat.

Ive been using the telerik controls now for the past week or so. First impression is very positive - good support via message forums and email, VERY good documentation and the control set seems easy to use and write code against. They work smooth at runtime and do what the documentation says they do. Today I downloaded Infragistics. First thing i noticed was the sparse documentation and there were no "how-to's" for developers. Then, their ajax support is an "add on" / beta which they dont provide developer support

http://www.infragistics.com/hot/aspnet-ajax-support.aspx