ag-grid vs slick-grid vs angular-grid which is better?

Disclosure: I'm the founder and CEO of ag-Grid.

First, some clarification on the question, ag-Grid used to be called angular-grid, however I presume you meant angular-ui-grid (or simply ui-grid), so allow me to answer ag-grid vs slick-grid vs ui-grid. The answer is ag-Grid.

For reference, these are the sites: ag-Grid, ui-grid, slick-grid

All grids are popular and widely used, each with a community of users.

To give a full comparison is outside the context of a Stackoverflow response, however feedback from the community says ag-Grid is better for the following reasons:

  1. ui-Grid only works in AngularJS 1.x. ag-Grid supports Angular 1 and 2, React and even native Javascript (no-Framework). So if using ui-Grid, you have only one option for your framework, that's AngularJS 1. Slickgrid is native Javascript (uses JQuery) so will work outside any framework also.
  2. Documentation for ag-Grid is excellent.
  3. For enterprise features (grouping, filtering, custom cell rendering, pinning) ag-Grid again wins. The grouping and aggregation feature of ag-Grid is not matched by the others. Slickgrid doesn't have pinning, which was a blocker for me. Only ag-Grid has Excel like filtering.
  4. slickgrid is no longer maintained by the founder (according to his website).
  5. ag-Grid is written using pure Javascript, it does not have any libraries as dependencies. ui-grid depends on Angular. Slickgrid depends on JQuery.
  6. Performance wise, SlickGrid and ag-Grid are on par. However ui-grid performs poorly on large datasets.
  7. Source code wise, the code inside ag-Grid is very well laid out, so when you need to understand how something works, it's easy to debug in through the code.
  8. Size-wize, ag-Grid is larger than much of the competition. Circa 1-Aug-2018, the CDN download for ag-grid is 783978 bytes minified..that doesn't include stylesheets. This may be a deal-breaker for some people.
  9. And lastly, if ui-grid or slickgrid were up to my standards, I wouldn't have needed to write ag-Grid!

I was looking around and found the best answer here : http://jspreadsheets.com.

All popular grid tools in one place, with demos and features and popularity indicators right there.

To make this a StackOverflow accepted answer, the comparison lists, in decreasing order of github stars:

  • Handsontable, handsontable.com
  • SlickGrid
  • Clusterize.js
  • ui-grid , ui-grid.info
  • DataTables, datatables.net
  • ng-table, ng-table.com
  • jqGrid
  • FancyGrid
  • BackGrid.js, backgridjs.com
  • Recline.js
  • ag-grid, ag-grid.com
  • Multiple others

All of these are usable within an Angular app, some more 'native' than others. Which one is 'better' depends on what you want to accomplish, and level of effort going into it.