If you’ve ever developed web applications for businesses or fintech companies, you’ve seen that they often use tables to organize data. A data grid is a component that renders data in rows and columns and enables users to perform operations such as sorting and filtering data, exporting data, in-cell editing, paging, and so on.

Grids are data-driven and built to handle high performance commercial network applications. They have this spreadsheet-like user experience and can be customized to build complex, extensible, and data-rich interfaces.

In this article, we’ll outline why data grids are important and discuss five JavaScript data grids that you should consider for your next project.

Why are data grids important

Data grid is essential in network applications that render large amounts of data, such as real-time reporting, tracking statistics, etc. Here are some reasons why you should choose a data grid for your next application.

  • Data grids can improve the performance of your applications. Most open source data grid libraries are very lightweight, so they don’t have to cover a lot of overhead. In addition, most libraries have virtual scrolling capabilities that can improve the user experience when scrolling through large data sets
  • Data grids have filtering, sorting, and paging capabilities that make it easier to navigate large data sets

Top five JavaScript data grids

Having seen some of the importance of using data grids, let’s take a look at some of them.

React Table

React Table is a headless, open source, lightweight, extensible data Table. With headless tables, it means it doesn’t control how your markup renders or UI elements. This gives you the freedom to tailor the topic of your spreadsheet to your application’s needs.

React Table allows you to configure your Table functions using React Hooks, such as filtering, sorting, paging, virtualized rows, in-cell editing, and more.

To add it to your project, install the package.

npm install react-table
// or
yarn add react-table

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Then, with the main hook useTable, start building a basic table. This is what a typical React table looks like, with pagination.

You can also check out the demo.

You can integrate React Table into your React application, even if you only need to use the usePagination hook for pagination. This is a tabular tool where you can combine these Hooks to build a powerful data grid for your application.

However, if you’re building a large-scale enterprise application, you might want to consider how long it takes for your team to build something tangible from scratch.

AG grid

The AG Grid is a complete, feature-rich table of JavaScript data. It has community and enterprise versions. It supports the major JavaScript frameworks including Vanilla JavaScripit, React, Vue, and Angular. Its core features include selection, filtering, data binding, rendering cells, in-cell editing, master-detail, import and export options, virtual scrolling, keyboard events, testing, and security options.

AG Grid also has other UI components to extend the Grid, such as sparklines, tool panels, context menus, status bars, and integrated and standalone charts.

To install the open source version of your JavaScript project, run.

npm install ag-grid-community

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If you are working on a React project, you must also install the ag-grid-React package to access all React UI components.

This is what a typical AG Grid data table looks like.

You can check out the basic demo to see how AG Grid works with React.

AG Grid also includes predefined UI themes and gives you the ability to create your own. These themes include Alpine (with Dark mode), Balham (with Dark Mode), and Material UI.

However, the capabilities of the AG Grid Community Edition are limited. You’ll need the Enterprise edition to get master-details, integration charts, Spark Lines, Excel exports, row grouping, aggregation, advanced filtering, developer support, and more. Still, if you’re working on a large enterprise project, you’ll want to consider the benefits of using this spreadsheet to reduce the pain of building a spreadsheet from scratch.

Grid.js

Grid.js is a free and open source Javascript table plug-in built in TypeScript. Grid.js has configurations such as data binding, filtering, custom and multi-column sorting, cell formatting, search and paging, selection, and React, Angular, and Vue support.

Just like we discussed React Table earlier, grid.js is an advanced utility Table plug-in. To add grid.js to your JavaScript project, run.

npm install gridjs

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Then import the Grid module and CSS theme and start building.

import { Grid } from "gridjs";
import "gridjs/dist/theme/mermaid.css";

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Also, React Table works with hooks, while grid.js works with configurations. Configuration is you passed to the Grid instance attributes, such as search, sort, pagination, style, and so on. If you’re using any JavaScript framework, grid.js already recommends packages for each framework.

For example, if you use React, you must run NPM install Gridjs-React, as well as install GridJS, since it is a core dependency for the wrapper to work with.

<Grid
  data={[
    ['John', '[email protected]'],
    ['Mike', '[email protected]']
  ]}
  columns={['Name', 'Email']}
  search={true}
  pagination={{
    enabled: true,
    limit: 1,
  }}
/>

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Grid.js has no problem with styling, so you can integrate your own themes and build a more complex spreadsheet.

You can watch this demo.

Grid.js is not suitable for enterprise use, however, because it lacks native support for in-cell editing, virtual scrolling, export options, Excel like filtering and sorting, and so on.

Handsontable

Handsontable is a JavaScript library for building fast and efficient data grids. It is licensed free and commercially and supports the React, Vue, and Angular frameworks. At its core, Handsontable implements data binding (getting data from the data source and how it is rendered on the data grid), local retention of data, middleware, events, hooks, and configuration. Similar to grid.js, Handsontable has configuration options that allow you to configure tables of data to your liking.

To add the package to your JavaScript project, run.

npm install handsontable

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Then import the Handsontable module and the CSS theme. If you are doing a React project, you will have to install the Handsontable React wrapper @handsonTable/React. This is a basic code snippet for Handsontable and React.

import { HotTable } from '@handsontable/react'; const hotData = [ ["", "Tesla", "Volvo", "Toyota", "Honda"], ["2020", 10, 11, 12, 13], ["2021", 20, 11, 14, 13], ["2022", 30, 15, 12, 13]; const App = () => { return ( <div id="hot-app"> <HotTable data={hotData} colHeaders={true} rowHeaders={true} width="600"  height="300" /> </div> ); }Copy the code

You can check out the demo to see how Handsontable and React work.

Handsontable has this spreadsheet like user interface, which is best when you want to build a web application for spreadsheets, with cell capabilities, types, formulas, context menus, keyboard navigation, internationalization, performing batch operations, andso on. However, when you use the library, your theme options are limited.

Toast the UI grid

As a JavaScript developer, you’ve probably come across Toast UI grid controls, especially notifications or pop-ups. Toast UI Grid is a pure JavaScript grid control for implementing data grids. Its features include: complex column manipulation, custom editor, theme options, date picker, validation, sorting, internationalization, data summary, custom events, frozen columns, filters, paging, and infinite scrolling.

To install Toast UI Grid in your JavaScript project, run.

npm install tui-grid

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Then import the grid module from tui-Grid. To start building your JavaScript Grid, create an instance of the Grid and pass options to it. Just like grid.js, you need to pass in configuration options and call various apis to build your Grid.

This is what a typical Toast UI grid looks like.

However, the Toast UI grid is a pure JavaScript grid and does not support other JavaScript frameworks, which you may want to consider when choosing libraries for your data grid requirements.

conclusion

JavaScript data grids are controls that are best handled by third parties because they give you a lot of functionality and reduce the time you spend building your own data grid tools. In this article, we discuss why data grids are important and compare five open source JavaScript data grids, including React Table, AG Grid, Handsontable, Grid.js, and Toast UI. We also highlighted the characteristics and usage of these data grids.