Syncfusion® Essential Studio® vs. Xamarin

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Syncfusion® Essential Studio®
Score 6.1 out of 10
N/A
Syncfusion Essential Studio is a suite of 1,900+ software components and frameworks for developing web, mobile, and desktop applications. Its UI controls are designed to be flexible and are optimized for high performance. Syncfusion enables users to speed the creation of modern user interfaces and read and write common file formats. Syncfusion states they have supplied components to 1 million+ developers across more than 30,000 organizations around the world, and the company offers…
$395
per month
Xamarin
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
N/AN/A
Pricing
Syncfusion® Essential Studio®Xamarin
Editions & Modules
Team License - Up to 5 developers
$395
per month
Team License - Up to 10 developers
$695
per month
More than a team of 10*
Customized Quote
Xamarin
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Syncfusion® Essential Studio®Xamarin
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Detailso A subscription license that covers a team of up to 5 members is available for $395 per month. Transferable annual license with unlimited deployment. Includes a license management portal. o A subscription license that covers a team of up to 10 members is available for $695 per month. Transferable annual license with unlimited deployment. Includes a license management portal. o For teams of more than 10, the Syncfusion sales team can prepare a custom quote. o Syncfusion offers subscription licenses that are suited to every organization's structure and needs. In addition to the Team Licenses described above, Project, Division, and Global subscription licenses are also available. Last updated: January 28, 2025 
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Syncfusion® Essential Studio®Xamarin
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User Ratings
Syncfusion® Essential Studio®Xamarin
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.2
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.3
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.2
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Syncfusion® Essential Studio®Xamarin
Likelihood to Recommend
The datagrid is probably their most popular control I would think. It is so flexible and configurable. Most of mine are plain views in ASP.NET Core, but I have a whole bunch that are dynamically created at runtime in my controller. That is so powerful.
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Xamarin is well suited for several reasons. The first, it allows companies to share code across platforms. If the app has a lot of business logic and a fairly simple UI, Xamarin is great for this use case. Xamarin also works well if the developers who will work on the app are already fluent in .NET. Xamarin is less appropriate if the company has a lot of developers. If there are plenty of resources to develop apps natively then the headache of dealing with Xamarin's issues are not worth the effort. If the UI is very complex and has difficult animations it's difficult to debug visual/performance issues in Xamarin.
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Pros
  • Integrates well into Microsoft tech stack. i.e. ASP.NET, Blazor etc. So it acts as a plug-n-play, which is great!
  • Shrinks the development cycle without adding too much of its own ecosystem overhead.
  • Provides different UI skins so the controls don't appear as "stitched".
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  • We save development time with Xamarin, because we use Xamarin Forms an so we can share most of the code over 3 platforms.
  • We can use our C# knowledge to develop iOS and Android Apps.
  • Xamarin's integration into Visual Studio is very good and became even better during the last releases of Visual Studio.
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Cons
  • Most complex activities (beyond the out of the box examples) require a very extensive knowledge of javascript. This is not really a short coming of the product but rather a reality for the user who is trying to fully utilize the capabilities of the software.
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  • Having also done a lot of native mobile development, some of the IDE's features need to emulator their native counterparts. For example, trying to extract a string resource on Android in Xamarin Studio is painful. There are many useful tools in Android Studio that Xamarin should implement.
  • Xamarin will always be behind on native platform features. They must catch up when Apple and Google release new platform versions.
  • The biggest pain point is the random issues Xamarin continues to have. Having a large code base on top of a native platform makes it very difficult to debug issues. Every developer must decide if its an issue with Xamarin or the native platform. Bugs don't get fixed very quickly. Hopefully that will change with the Microsoft acquisition.
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Likelihood to Renew
It takes effort to include a new component library into existing software, especially in our case where we have 5 large applications that are written and maintained by about 100 developers. So changing such a core thing comes with a lot of effort. The other reason we will very likely renew our use of Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition is that it works really well and has helped us to speed up the development process.
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Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.
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Usability
I would rate Syncfusion® Essential Studio® a 10 out of 10 for overall usability. The components are intuitive to implement, with clear APIs and consistent design patterns across the suite. This makes it easy for developers to get started quickly and reduces the learning curve even when working with new controls.
In addition, the documentation and sample projects provide practical guidance that helps accelerate development. The built-in customization options also allow us to adapt the components to fit our branding and business requirements without excessive effort. Overall, the usability is one of the key reasons why Syncfusion has become an essential part of our development toolset.
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If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done
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Support Rating
Although I have decades of software development experience, I had never created a website from scratch before, and my html and css skills are not particularly strong. Between documentation and incredible dedication from the support team they helped me overcome all of my challenges. It's amazing that they typically create sample code for most of the issues that I submitted. On rare occasions where I uncovered a defect they kept me informed as to its status, and typically resolved it in a short-term release, and/or gave me a reasonable workaround. They hopped on zoom calls with me on multiple occasions when necessary.
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I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow
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Implementation Rating
Feedback from the team has been very positive.
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Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.
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Alternatives Considered
Firstly, there is a free version for small businesses and it allows you to jump start without risk. I found one of the other products a bit short in the number of out-of-the-box supported events handlers for each control and, although you can manually add them, I feel more comfortable to just have them ready. After using the free version I just felt in love with Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition controls and decided to stay with them; they have all I need and more. The usage of Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition controls is straightforward and intuitive. Support is world-class even for the free version; you get answers in 24 hours at most. Also, the support team is ready to remotely connect to your project in case it is needed; we have had one situation like this, and the issue was solved.
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Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.
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Return on Investment
  • First of all, I think the best positive impact is the reduce of time development. I do not know exactly how much time, but certainly, using the framework we save a lot of effort and time.
  • About negative impact, sometimes using the controls of the framewrok have a signifcant impact in the execution time and page load.
  • And of course, the use of Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition has a significant impact of the learning of javascript and JQUERY.
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  • Code Sharing - We were able to launch an Android implementation of our app within weeks after finishing iOS. The amount of time taken to develop a new platform is very small.
  • Monetization - not the best, but definitely getting better. We've had issues with finding suitable ad networks that work with Xamarin.
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ScreenShots