JavaScript Grids' World

Hey, my name is Mike, I am founder and CTO at FancyGrid and today I wanna you dive into the World of JavaScript Grids with my short story.

About me

I am with JavaScript for already 12 years. At the end of 2015 I decided to do self commercial solution. Today my product is used by Fortune 500, banks, goverment orgs, medcine firms, retail, tech, fintech startups, manufactures and others in 21 countries.

Grid component is not just data displaying, it is ability to manupulate data in variety of ways with unlimit number of features. More over such component must have huge documention and at least 1,000+ of complex tests to provide stability.

The first time I thaught about self solution in 2010 when realized that to do company project I have to use huge, complex, expensive UI framework that does not provide ability to use only grid. But wish is not enough, it also needs huge experience , a lot of time and money .

The first one is UI frameworks like Kendo UI, Sencha and others.

If you choose grid from such framework, you should use the whole framework and you can’t slice only grid from it. 

Another part is Agnostic JavaScript grids and this part is also devided on 2 parts. The part “a” is Standalone solutions and the part “b” are Dependable solutions. 

Dependablegrids are written on jQuery, AngularJS, Angular, Vue, React and other frameworks. 

Sorely frameworks are good only about application architecture but they lack about ability to build fast and complex component with huge data as grid.

Standalone Independentsolutions with good level are presented by just several grids.

If you like you can study all JavaScript grids on this link that I collected for years: Awesome Grid

a) No dependencies, please.

b) It was spent at least 10,000 hours on development.

c) It is 1.5 years old to avoid young products with many bugs.

So they are: ag-Grid , FancyGrid and HandSontable

Let’s study pros and cons of them and try to understand which solution suits to your business.

ag-Grid
It is one of the best JavaScript Grid in the world. And it is really fantastic that it was founded by one person and now reached 15 staff. It is very profitable and located in London. It was founded by Niall Crosby who was Java developer and worked in banks for years and he tired of situation that there is not good level grid product for banks. Niall knew banks’ needs and that fact helped him to do awesome product.

40–50% of his clients are banks and fintech companies.

It does not have 100% of grid features since it is impossible to implement all grid features but it is the product that will suit to any company.

The only one con of product is cost. It is very expensive with annual payments. There is also free version but one day your company will need features from pro pack and you would need to buy it.

To be honest I even regret that I do not work with Niall since I heard many good words about him and I talked with him several times. He is awesome CEO and his staff is lucky to work with such person.

HandSontable   It is cool product but absolutely another. It was founded as alternative to Google Spread Sheets. It suits you if you need component that looks like Excel. It has good price but you can not replicate many features that ag-Grid has, example grouping rows .

And last but not least…

FancyGrid
This product is very similar to ag-Grid and it can reproduce many features of it. It has really small price with only one time fee. It has huge good documentation, variety of samples. It has some unique features like: integration with charts, form module to edit data and some others.

As founder I am very proud that could reach it.

The only one I miss, I am too tech person and I am not good about finding investments to reach the level that ag-Grid has.

Today FancyGrid has just 15,000 of visitors per month when ag-Grid has ~400,000 of visitors per month. 

My dream is to do FancyGrid from just good product, awesome Unicorn like AirTable .

Thank you for your time.

I hope this article was useful for you.