ag-Grid VS react-table

In this post I’ll show you how, using the AG Grid component and Ably Spaces, you can create a React application that allows users to see not only who else is currently viewing the grid, but using a Flowbite Avatar Stack component, what row each user currently has selected.

something like ag-grid? https://github.com/ag-grid/ag-grid

I personally use https://www.ag-grid.com/ for all my data grid needs. It has a free community version (that should get you covered imo) as well as a paid one with advanced features.

To be fair, in any GUI toolkit, the "table" is abolutely the most complex general purpose widget. People really under estimate the difficult of an efficient implementation. Qt spents YEARS improving their QTableWidget class. The implementation is mind-bogglingly complex. I am sure many very smart summer interns (PhDs!) have tried to tweak that class to squeeze every bit of performance possible. The table class in GTK+ and MSFT DotNet's WPF are equally, freakishly insane.

Consider this idea: Most people who use a table class in a GUI framework assume it is essentially infinitely scalable (myself included!). I am talking about millions of rows or thousands of columns with all kinds of silly widgets injected into individual cells. It is a crazy hard computer science problem to solve. I would not doubt there are many PhD thesises written on the topic of fast, scalable table widgets.

Beyond desktop GUI toolkits, people have tried to do the same in a browser (HTML/CSS/JS). Have you seen AG-Grid? Woah, it is unbelievable how much goddamn data you can squeeze into that widget. Most Wall Streets web-based trading apps use it one way or another. It's just so hard to beat. Ref: https://www.ag-grid.com/ There must be 1,000 person years of optimisation sunk into that implementation.

Tanstack - Tanstack has evolved to an entire ecosystem consisting of the famous Tanstack (or React) Query, Tanstack Table, now also Tanstack Router and Tanstack Form. It started with Tanstack Query, which adopted Nx and Nx Cloud. Zack talked about this collab with Dominik, and we also had Dominik on our Nx live stream. Now, all the above-mentioned Tanstack libs have adopted Nx, and there's more coming.

If you want to bring your own UI, TanStack Table (formerly React Table) [0], if you want something that's batteries included, MUI [1]. There are of course other options with either close or full feature parity, but these are the two I see most often with least pain across different companies. While we're on the topic of recommendations, avoid any- and everything by Telerik.

[0] https://tanstack.com/table/

[1] https://mui.com/material-ui/react-table/

Happy to help, here's one for next time you need tables: https://github.com/TanStack/table

Or for the table react-table can be a powerful option to consider.

svelte-headless-table: Unopinionated and extensible data tables for Svelte. (I haven't tried tanstack-table, but I've heard good things about it)

solution

For this week's pick, I chose TanStack Table, a table-building solution that offers power and flexibility. This headless UI solution provides a lightweight and agnostic core, making it easy to integrate into any React, Solid, Vue, Svelte, or TS/JS project.