After thousands of sales calls and attending many conferences, we clearly understand why our users choose AG Grid over the competition. This article explains the main reasons why AG Grid has become the leading Enterprise JavaScript data grid.
Some reasons being:
- Support for multiple frameworks with the same API.
- GUI layer tailored for each framework for the best developer experience and performance.
- Community Edition is completely free, even for commercial use.
- Our code is open source so you can review the code as part of your evaluation.
- Dedicated support team for Enterprise customers.
- Features no other Data Grid provides like pivoting, grouping, integrated charts.
The ‘ag’ in AG Grid stands for AGnostic
AG Grid has zero dependencies such as Angular or React, we don’t even use JQuery, Underscore or LoDash. The foundations of AG Grid is a custom made framework designed specifically for AG Grid. Having no dependency means AG Grid will work with any framework — we call this framework agnostic.
Being framework agnostic allows you to choose your framework and data grid separately. It also reduces the work required when you move frameworks (e.g. moving from Angular 1 to Angular, VueJS to Reactetc.).
If you choose a data grid that is not framework agnostic (e.g. written using Angular) then you are locked into that framework.
We believe that your data grid selection should not lock you into a specific framework.
We are not aware of any other data grid that is agnostic like AG Grid.
Learn more about our Agnostic data grid philosophy.
Enterprise Foundations
The authors of AG Grid come with years of delivering reporting and data warehousing solutions to investment banks and telecommunications companies. We are not traditional web developers, our skills are not creating consumer facing websites, but enterprise applications.
We understand data and how to best manage it.
Pretty much all other JavaScript data grids start off solving a particular problem (e.g. filters and sorting, or a pivot table) but then fail to scale. The designs are not extensible to the complex requirements of a data grid.
We built AG Grid because no other data grid met our development needs as we explain in The History of AG Grid
AG Grid’s solid design allows it to manage:
- the core features of a data grid and
- items which do not exist in other grids e.g. pivoting.
AG Grid does the standard features better and then takes if further with advanced features not seen in other data grids.
We are not aware of any other data grid that manages complexity like AG Grid.
Integrating, not Wrapping
AG Grid integrates with frameworks such as Angular and React. That means AG Grid is not only available as a React or Angular component, it also allows you to use React and Angular inside AG Grid for custom cell rendering.
We are not aware of any other grid component that allows you to select from any of these frameworks inside the grid while staying agnostic.
Dedicated Framework GUI Support
We have a core set of code for the main grid.
We have dedicated GUI packages for each Framework, this allows us to provide the same Grid API for each framework and offer more dedicated framework support.
Our React package is fully written in React so all the normal React approaches for custom Hooks and using the React Dev tools works. The GUI element of the grid is pure React.
Our Angular package is fully typed and completely supports TypeScript making it a seamless Angular developer experience.
Most grids pick one framework, or are generic JavaScript leading to a less effective framework experience. We offer a core API experience across all frameworks with specfic developer focussed enhancements for each framework.
Features Above and Beyond
AG Grid gives for free what other grids are charging for. There is no reason to buy another data grid. The enterprise version of AG Grid contains features that go above and beyond other data grids on the market.
We are not aware of any other grid that provides the same level of enterprise features as AG Grid.
AG Grid is often used as the baseline which other grids compete against. Some competing grids are still developing features which AG Grid has offered for several years e.g. grouping, pivoting, range selection.
AG Grid provides features that no other grid has matched e.g our Integrated Charting solution allows the user to explore data visually without any development effort.
We add all features into a single grid. We don't create separate grids for tree layouts, pivot tables or different frameworks. One grid, same features and API across all frameworks.
We have a page of feature comparison between the Community Edition and Enterprise Edition
Open Source
Both AG Grid and AG Grid-Enterprise are open source — AG Grid is free, AG Grid Enterprise requires a license. Both sets of code are available on Github where you can see the code and raise issues and pull requests. The open source nature allows the community to advise the AG Grid team and act as code reviewers. A closed source project does not have the same community support or visibility.
When people evaluate AG Grid they are able to view the source and evaluate our architectural decisions.
We are not aware of any other commercial data grid that offers its code as open source on Github.
Free and Commercial
AG Grid has both free and commercial versions. This allows everyone to benefit from AG Grid even if their budget is limited.
The commercial version funds the growth of the project. This guarantees the AG Grid project will continue while also providing the best standard JavaScript data grid for free.
This also allows you to explore, evaluate and experiment with AG Grid using the free community edition without having to engage in a sales process, and your evaluation can take as long as it needs to.
Community Edition is Free for Commercial Use
If the community edition meets your needs then you can use it without any licensing issues in commercial applications.
Many of our customers start by using the community edition in their commercial products and upgrade to the enterprise version for support and access to the more advanced features.
The best way to evaluate a component like a Data Grid is to use it in an application, we encourage you to explore our code, and use the community edition freely and without worrying about any licensing issues. No trial period is required, with the community edition you can take as long as you need to. Deploying your app with the community edition into production and gain user feedback.
Pure Open Source has more Risk
Purely open source projects come with no support or warranty. They also run a greater risk of discontinuing as the developers find other ways to spend their free time.
If you are using an open source data grid that is not owned by a recognised company, it runs the risk of losing developer support and becoming stale and unsupported.
AG Grid has an office, revenue and employees. Keeping AG Grid alive is our job.
Extension and Flexibility
AG Grid has an API that supports developers in building advanced features and extending the grid.
Developers appreciate all the hooks and capabilities for adding custom components and styling into the grid.
We are so flexible that there are companies and open source projects that have built products to create new themes and new GUI capabilities for the grid while the core grid functionality is left unchanged. e.g. Adaptable Tools
Our APIs and dependency free bundle means that AG Grid is also available as a plugin to many Data Vizualisation and ML tools like R and Streamlit.
We Keep Advancing
We concentrate on core features that integrate into the grid. We don't supply a library of components because all our development effort goes into making the best grid possible. We don't want to take over your entire application development process we want to enable you in creating a highly performant and scalable data grid visualisation system.
AG Grid continues to surpass the competition. You can expect AG Grid to march forward and go to places no JavaScript data grid has gone before — all while the other data grids struggle to catch up.
Learn more about AG Grid — high performance Data Grid. We write the code to visualise data in interactive tables so you can concentrate on writing the application code. We support multiple frameworks: Angular, Vue, React and JavaScript so you can pick the best framework for your needs.