FooTables vs Datatables - Name your personal choice + pros and cons.

MenltonGomes

I just stumbled on FooTables while playing around with bootstrap and I love it! I use to be a datatables fan through and through but now I don't know. The only thing I'm not sure about with FooTables is working with large data sets. Now there is an example on the site for pulling from a json file to help with load time but it does NOT have one for pulling from a MYSQL database. I'm not sure if this can be done if so it is far beyond my JS capabilities.

Anyway, which do you prefer and why? Pros and cons?

Thanks!

allan

Hi,

Thanks for starting this discussion. I'm not sure how much feedback you'll get from FooTable users since this is a DataTables forum, but perhaps someone who has evaluated both will be able to share their thoughts.

It's worth saying first up that FooTable is an excellent library and there are a number of other excellent libraries for tables also available (see the copious number of "Top X table plug-ins" on the web). I'd encourage you, and everyone else considering DataTables or other libraries to try out a few and see what suits your needs best. Also give feedback (to me and the other authors) - what works, what is needed, etc, so as a community we can try to move forward.

The different libraries have different strengths - one might be the license, for example. FooTable is GPLv3 (thus your code must also be) unless you want a commercial license. DataTables is MIT licensed. I feel our API is more comprehensive as well along with the documentation on the site. But that might just be a personal opinion (as the author of DataTables I'm hardly unbiased!). DataTables also works with multiple styling libraries, which might or might not be important for you, and DataTables is still under active development and is fully supported. Its not clear to me that FooTable is still in development or supported from their git repo.

I've not done a feature by feature breakdown. Indeed I never will, that's not a "game" I want to get into - I want to focus on making DataTables the best I can for myself and the developers using DataTables without focusing on a feature race.

Allan