Compared to Other Grids

This page compares @toolbox-web/grid against three widely-used JavaScript data grids: AG Grid, Tabulator, and SlickGrid. The goal is an honest side-by-side on features, bundle size, and — below — measured performance in your own browser.

Why these three?

We picked grids that bracket the realistic alternatives a team evaluates today, rather than a long tail of niche libraries:

AG Grid is the de-facto enterprise data grid and the one most often raised as the benchmark to beat. Including it sets the upper bound on feature breadth (especially with the paid Enterprise tier) and the upper bound on bundle size.
Tabulator is the most popular MIT-licensed, framework-agnostic option with broad feature coverage. It’s the natural mid-point: free, full-featured, but built on a more traditional rendering model.
SlickGrid (the maintained 6pac fork) represents the lightweight, virtualization-first lineage that many “fast” grids descend from. It anchors the lower bound on bundle size and shows what a minimal, performance-focused grid looks like.

Together they span the realistic spectrum — enterprise, mainstream MIT, and minimalist — so the numbers below are meaningful regardless of which corner of the market you’re shopping in. Grids that are tied to a single framework (e.g. MUI DataGrid, PrimeNG Table, Vuetify DataTable) are intentionally out of scope: @toolbox-web/grid is framework-agnostic, and comparing it only against framework-locked grids would skew the picture.

Disclaimer: Feature availability based on publicly available documentation as of May 2026 for AG Grid, Tabulator, and SlickGrid (6pac fork v2.x). AG Grid is a trademark of AG Grid Ltd. This is an independent comparison and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of the listed projects. We encourage you to verify current feature availability on each project’s site.

Quick Summary

Aspect	@toolbox-web/grid	AG Grid	Tabulator	SlickGrid
License	MIT	MIT (Community) / Commercial (Enterprise)	MIT	MIT (6pac fork)
Cost	Free	Free / $999+/dev/year	Free	Free
Bundle Size (gzipped)	~45 KB	~200 KB+ (Community) · ~300 KB+ (Enterprise)	~90 KB	~30 KB + jQuery
Dependencies	Zero	Zero	Zero	jQuery
Framework Support	All (Web Component)	All (wrappers)	All (wrappers)	Vanilla / jQuery
TypeScript	✅ Bundled	✅ Bundled	✅ Bundled	Community types

Feature Comparison

Legend: ✅ first-party support (built-in or official plugin/module) · ⚙️ requires third-party extension or manual wiring · ❌ not available · For AG Grid, values are shown as Community / Enterprise when they differ.

Feature	@toolbox-web/grid	AG Grid (CE / Ent)	Tabulator	SlickGrid
Row Virtualization	✅	✅	✅	✅
Column Virtualization	✅	✅	✅	✅
Sorting (Single & Multi)	✅	✅	✅	✅
Column Resizing	✅	✅	✅	✅
Column Reordering	✅	✅	✅	✅
Column Pinning/Freezing	✅	✅	✅	✅
Row Pinning	✅	✅	✅	✅
Cell Selection	✅	✅	✅	✅
Row Selection	✅	✅	✅	✅
Checkbox Selection	✅	✅	✅	✅
Custom Cell Renderers	✅	✅	✅	✅
Cell Editing	✅	✅	✅	✅
Custom Editors	✅	✅	✅	✅
Keyboard Navigation	✅	✅	✅	✅
Themes/Styling	✅ (6 built-in)	✅	✅ (5 built-in)	Minimal
CSV Export	✅	✅	✅	✅
Filtering	✅	✅	✅	✅
Pagination	✅	✅	✅	⚙️
Column Visibility	✅	✅	✅	✅
Row Animations	✅	✅	Limited	❌
Range Selection	✅	❌ / ✅ Paid	✅	⚙️
Clipboard (Copy/Paste)	✅	❌ / ✅ Paid	✅	⚙️
Excel Export	✅	❌ / ✅ Paid	✅ (basic)	⚙️
Row Grouping	✅	❌ / ✅ Paid	✅	✅
Aggregation/Footers	✅	❌ / ✅ Paid	✅	✅
Pivot Table	✅	❌ / ✅ Paid	❌	❌
Tree Data	✅	❌ / ✅ Paid	✅	✅
Master-Detail	✅	❌ / ✅ Paid	✅	⚙️
Server-Side Row Model	✅	❌ / ✅ Paid	✅ (progressive)	Manual
Infinite Scrolling	✅	❌ / ✅ Paid	✅	Manual
Context Menu	✅	❌ / ✅ Paid	⚙️	⚙️
Column Groups (Spanning)	✅	❌ / ✅ Paid	✅	✅
Row Drag & Drop	✅	❌ / ✅ Paid	✅	⚙️
Print	✅	❌ / ✅ Paid	✅	❌
Undo/Redo	✅	❌ / ✅ Paid	✅ (history)	❌
Responsive/Mobile Layout	✅ (card layout)	Manual	✅ (collapse)	Manual
Framework Agnostic	✅ Native Web Component	Wrapper-based	Wrapper-based	jQuery-based
Tree-Shakeable Plugins	✅	Partial	Partial (modules)	❌
Integrated Charts	❌	❌ / ✅ Paid	❌	❌
Built-in Sparklines	❌ (via custom renderer)	❌ / ✅ Paid	❌	❌
Excel-like Cell Formulas	❌	❌ / ✅ Paid	❌	❌
Advanced Excel Export	❌ (basic)	❌ / ✅ Paid (styles & formulas)	❌	❌
Dedicated Support with SLAs	❌	❌ / ✅ Paid	❌	❌

Why Choose Toolbox Grid?

Truly Free, Forever

MIT License — Use commercially, modify, redistribute
No “Enterprise” tier — All features available to everyone
No per-developer pricing — Scale your team without scaling costs
No watermarks or nag screens — Production-ready from day one

Performance That Scales

100,000+ rows at 60fps — Efficient row virtualization
~45KB gzipped — Half the size of AG Grid Community
Zero dependencies — Nothing to conflict or update
DOM recycling — Minimal garbage collection pressure

Don’t take our word for it — run the live benchmark below. Pick a competitor from the dropdown — AG Grid Community, Tabulator, or SlickGrid — then click Run Comparison. It iterates through increasing data sizes (5K → 1M rows), testing Toolbox Grid and the chosen competitor sequentially in your browser with equivalent data and configuration. Results are cached per competitor for the lifetime of the page, so you can switch back without re-running.

Compare against Ready

Show Grid Configurations

Toolbox Grid

// Configuration displayed here

Competitor

// Configuration displayed here

Grid will render here during benchmarks (one at a time)

Pick a competitor and click Run Comparison to benchmark both grids at increasing data sizes.

Scale points: 5K → 100K → 500K → 1M rows × 10 columns. Macro ops (real scaling work): time-to-first-paint, sort, filter, data replacement — these drive the headline speedup. Round-trip sums the macro times. Micro ops (within-frame interactions): single-row update, column resize, scroll-to-end, destroy — reported separately because most ties cluster at the ~16 ms vsync floor on every virtualized grid. Viewport overhead: DOM node count after first paint. Each metric runs 5× per scale point (trimmed mean).

How this benchmark works

The selected competitor (and its CSS theme) is loaded once from a CDN — always the latest published version
At each scale point, Toolbox Grid benchmarks run first, then the grid is destroyed
A cooldown period allows garbage collection
The competitor runs the same tests on the same data
Results build up progressively, showing the scaling curve. Switching the dropdown shows cached results instantly; you only re-run when you click the button again.

Expand Show Grid Configurations in the benchmark to verify both grids use equivalent settings. Each competitor has its own adapter under apps/docs/src/components/demos/competitors/ so the benchmark sequence is identical and only the per-grid API calls differ.

A few caveats per competitor:

SlickGrid is pinned to v2.4.x (the last release with the global Slick namespace) and pulls jQuery from CDN. Column reorder and drag are disabled to keep the dependency surface minimal.

True Framework Freedom

Unlike wrapper-based grids, @toolbox-web/grid is a native Web Component that works identically in:

Vanilla JavaScript/TypeScript
React (with optional adapter for JSX renderers)
Angular (with optional adapter for template renderers)
Vue
Svelte
Any JavaScript environment

One component, same API, everywhere.

Developer Experience

Helpful error messages — Missing a plugin? Get an import hint, not a cryptic error
Plugin validation — Dependencies checked at runtime with actionable guidance
Type-safe configuration — Full TypeScript support with IntelliSense

When another grid is the better choice

Be fair — each of the compared grids is excellent in its own niche. Pick another grid if you need:

Integrated charting — AG Grid Enterprise includes deep AG Charts integration with chart-from-grid workflows
Built-in sparklines — Pre-built mini-chart cell renderers (Toolbox supports this via custom renderers)
Excel-like formulas — Spreadsheet-style cell formulas like =SUM(A1:A10) (AG Grid Enterprise)
Dedicated support — Paid support contracts with SLAs and guaranteed response times (AG Grid Enterprise)
A jQuery-native stack — SlickGrid (6pac fork) is still a great fit if your app already lives in that world and you want minimum surface area
Long-term commercial backing — VC-funded company with enterprise support infrastructure (AG Grid)

Migrating to Toolbox Grid

Most concepts in the other grids map cleanly to Toolbox Grid. Pick the section for your current grid below.

From AG Grid

AG Grid	Toolbox Grid
`columnDefs`	`columns` or `gridConfig.columns`
`rowData`	`rows`
`defaultColDef`	Per-type defaults via `typeDefaults` (keyed by `column.type`)
`getRowId`	`getRowId: (row) => string` (same shape)
`onCellValueChanged`	`cell-commit` event
`onSelectionChanged`	`selection-change` event
`serverSideRowModel`	`ServerSidePlugin`
`rowGrouping`	`GroupingRowsPlugin`
`masterDetail`	`MasterDetailPlugin`

Side-by-side AG Grid → Toolbox Grid for the same minimal setup: data, columns, and row selection.

<!-- AG Grid (vanilla) -->
<div id="myGrid" class="ag-theme-quartz" style="height: 400px;"></div>

<script type="module">
  import { createGrid } from 'ag-grid-community';

  createGrid(document.querySelector('#myGrid'), {
    rowData: rows,
    columnDefs: columns,
    rowSelection: 'multiple',
  });
</script>

<!-- Toolbox Grid (vanilla) -->
<tbw-grid style="height: 400px;"></tbw-grid>

<script type="module">
  import '@toolbox-web/grid';
  import '@toolbox-web/grid/features/selection';
  import { queryGrid } from '@toolbox-web/grid';

  const grid = queryGrid('tbw-grid');
  grid.gridConfig = {
    columns,
    features: { selection: 'row' },
  };
  grid.rows = rows;
</script>

// AG Grid
import { AgGridReact } from 'ag-grid-react';

<AgGridReact
  rowData={rows}
  columnDefs={columns}
  rowSelection="multiple"
/>

// Toolbox Grid
import '@toolbox-web/grid-react/features/selection';
import { DataGrid } from '@toolbox-web/grid-react';

<DataGrid
  rows={rows}
  columns={columns}
  selection="row"
/>

<!-- AG Grid -->
<script setup>
import { AgGridVue } from 'ag-grid-vue3';
</script>

<template>
  <AgGridVue
    :rowData="rows"
    :columnDefs="columns"
    rowSelection="multiple"
  />
</template>

<!-- Toolbox Grid -->
<script setup>
import '@toolbox-web/grid-vue/features/selection';
import { TbwGrid } from '@toolbox-web/grid-vue';
</script>

<template>
  <TbwGrid
    :rows="rows"
    :columns="columns"
    selection="row"
  />
</template>

// AG Grid
import { Component } from '@angular/core';
import { AgGridAngular } from 'ag-grid-angular';

@Component({
  imports: [AgGridAngular],
  template: `
    <ag-grid-angular
      [rowData]="rows"
      [columnDefs]="columns"
      rowSelection="multiple">
    </ag-grid-angular>
  `,
})
export class MyGridComponent {}

// Toolbox Grid
import { Component } from '@angular/core';
import { Grid } from '@toolbox-web/grid-angular';
import { GridSelectionDirective } from '@toolbox-web/grid-angular/features/selection';

@Component({
  imports: [Grid, GridSelectionDirective],
  template: `
    <tbw-grid
      [rows]="rows"
      [columns]="columns"
      [selection]="'row'">
    </tbw-grid>
  `,
})
export class MyGridComponent {}

From Tabulator

Tabulator	Toolbox Grid
`new Tabulator(el, options)`	`<tbw-grid>` element + `grid.gridConfig = { ... }`
`columns: [{ field, title, ... }]`	`columns: [{ field, header, ... }]` (rename `title` → `header`)
`data` option / `setData(rows)`	`grid.rows = rows`
`index: 'id'`	`getRowId: (row) => String(row.id)`
`layout: 'fitColumns'` / `'fitDataFill'`	`fitMode: 'auto'` / `'fixed'`
`setSort([{ column, dir }])`	`grid.sort(field, 'asc' \| 'desc')`
`setFilter(field, type, value)`	`FilteringPlugin` + `filterPlugin.setFilterModel([...])`
`cellEdited` callback	`cell-commit` event
`rowSelected` callback	`selection-change` event
`dataTree: true`	`TreeDataPlugin`
`pagination: 'local'`	`PaginationPlugin`

<!-- Tabulator -->
<div id="myGrid" style="height: 400px;"></div>

<script type="module">
  import { Tabulator } from 'tabulator-tables';

  new Tabulator('#myGrid', {
    data: rows,
    columns: [
      { title: 'Name', field: 'name', headerSort: true },
      { title: 'Email', field: 'email' },
    ],
    selectableRows: true,
  });
</script>

<!-- Toolbox Grid -->
<tbw-grid style="height: 400px;"></tbw-grid>

<script type="module">
  import '@toolbox-web/grid';
  import '@toolbox-web/grid/features/selection';
  import { queryGrid } from '@toolbox-web/grid';

  const grid = queryGrid('tbw-grid');
  grid.gridConfig = {
    columns: [
      { field: 'name', header: 'Name', sortable: true },
      { field: 'email', header: 'Email' },
    ],
    features: { selection: 'row' },
  };
  grid.rows = rows;
</script>

From SlickGrid

SlickGrid’s API is lower-level than the others — most behavior is composed from Slick.Grid + Slick.Data.DataView + plugin instances. Toolbox Grid bundles the equivalents into config and built-in plugins.

SlickGrid	Toolbox Grid
`new Slick.Grid(el, dataView, columns, options)`	`<tbw-grid>` + `grid.gridConfig = { columns, ... }`
`Slick.Data.DataView`	Built into the grid; pass plain arrays to `grid.rows`
`columns: [{ id, name, field }]`	`columns: [{ field, header }]` (drop separate `id`; `field` is the key)
`dataView.setItems(rows, 'id')`	`grid.rows = rows` + `getRowId: (row) => String(row.id)`
`dataView.sort(comparer, asc)`	`grid.sort(field, 'asc' \| 'desc')`
`dataView.setFilter(fn)`	`FilteringPlugin` (declarative filter model)
`Slick.Plugins.RowSelectionModel`	`features: { selection: 'row' }`
`Slick.CheckboxSelectColumn`	`features: { selection: 'checkbox' }`
`Slick.CellRangeSelector` + `CellSelectionModel`	`RangeSelectionPlugin`
`onCellChange`	`cell-commit` event
`onSelectedRowsChanged`	`selection-change` event
Manual jQuery resize handler	Built-in column resize feature

<!-- SlickGrid -->
<div id="myGrid" style="height: 400px;"></div>

<script type="module">
  // SlickGrid 6pac fork v2.4.x — global Slick namespace
  const dataView = new Slick.Data.DataView();
  dataView.setItems(rows, 'id');

  const grid = new Slick.Grid('#myGrid', dataView, [
    { id: 'name', name: 'Name', field: 'name', sortable: true },
    { id: 'email', name: 'Email', field: 'email' },
  ], { enableCellNavigation: true });

  grid.setSelectionModel(new Slick.RowSelectionModel());
</script>

<!-- Toolbox Grid -->
<tbw-grid style="height: 400px;"></tbw-grid>

<script type="module">
  import '@toolbox-web/grid';
  import '@toolbox-web/grid/features/selection';
  import { queryGrid } from '@toolbox-web/grid';

  const grid = queryGrid('tbw-grid');
  grid.gridConfig = {
    columns: [
      { field: 'name', header: 'Name', sortable: true },
      { field: 'email', header: 'Email' },
    ],
    getRowId: (row) => String(row.id),
    features: { selection: 'row' },
  };
  grid.rows = rows;
</script>

Get Started

npm install @toolbox-web/grid

import '@toolbox-web/grid';

const grid = document.createElement('tbw-grid');
grid.columns = [
  { field: 'name', header: 'Name', sortable: true },
  { field: 'email', header: 'Email' },
];
grid.rows = [
  { name: 'Alice', email: 'alice@example.com' },
  { name: 'Bob', email: 'bob@example.com' },
];
document.body.appendChild(grid);

Ready to switch? Check out our Getting Started guide or live demos.