hismightiness wrote
I am not going to put a full comparison here, but here is why I have chosen to use telerik for 4 years now, and over countless projects.
- Undeniably great customer service - sometimes they even write code for you
- Regular fixes and releases
- Smaller download sizes for the client-side files (in comparison to the others you mentioned)
I attended a code camp this spring, and one of the sessions covered all three in pretty good detail. Although the other two indeed have some features that telerik could definitely take advantage of, telerik topped the list in at least those 3 categories.
My one point of contention now is the price. They are priced very well for a well-funded project, and especially a company, but a freelancer or hobbyist has no chance to take advantage of any of these great tools.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on the footprint for telerik. When we were building the first release of Active CRM, we carefully evaluated every control suite we could fine. It came down to ComponentArt and Telerik. I have been a fan of the r.a.d. editor since the first day it was released. However, it has become massive over the years. Whether you have 5 buttons in your toolbar or all of them, the footprint is the same. Before we released Active CRM, we actually created two versions of the application, one with ComponentArt and the other with Telerik. We were testing for total payload for each request, processor utilization on the client and the server, rendering speed and total lines of code needed to accomplish each various task (i.e. datagrid, callback, treeview).
DataGrid
Speed - ComponentArt
Payload - ComponentArt - (both controls produce a ton of client side code. Compression helps)
Lines of Code - Telerik
Features - Tie
NavBar and Menus
Both products were pretty much equal. ComponentArt was still a lighter control.
Tabs & Multipage
Honestly, I can't remember exactly the details for Telerik. I will say that before you go creating a view with 7 tabs and pageviews you need to carefully consider if this is the best way to load your page. If you choose the basic, default methods (non-ajax) you are basically creating 7 pages of content which will all load at once on the first load.
Callback - Testing stopped at this point. Telerik could not load nested controls in their callback.
Speed - ComponentArt
Payload - ComponentArt
Lines of Code - ComponentArt
Features - ComponentArt
All that being said, we have ended up writing our own controls. We even replaced the ComponentArt CallBack with our own control due to limitations with dynamically loaded nested controls. The only third party controls we use now are the ComponentArt NavBar and their new editor control. Here is a link to a blog post I made almost a year ago about the ComponentArt grid.
http://geekswithblogs.net/wmorgenweck/archive/2007/02/02/105242.aspx
If you are looking for speed and complete control of your data then all you need is a good callback control, the stringbuilder and a good old datareader.