A scheduling library is used to add schedulers to applications. These schedulers are used to schedule tasks at desired times by users, either daily, weekly, biweekly, or yearly, and are especially useful because they make scheduling and rescheduling events/appointments easy. Scheduling interfaces are common in travel software, project management, and admin panel applications.
Building a scheduling interface from scratch is time-consuming and expensive, which is why using a scheduling library is advantageous. In addition, most libraries are easy to learn and use.
While it may be tempting to use the first scheduling library you come across, not all libraries are created equal. In this article, you'll look at several scheduling libraries and compare them based on their features and functionality, community support, cost/licensing, developer experience, and ease of use.
The Best Frontend Scheduling Libraries
All scheduling libraries have different features that set them apart. When selecting a library for your use case, it's important to look at its features, community support, cost, and first-party support for paid options.
Bryntum Scheduler
The Bryntum Scheduler is a JavaScript scheduling library that can be integrated with all the popular frontend frameworks, including React, Angular, and Vue.js. It offers a high-performant scheduling UI component based on the Bryntum Grid.
Developer Experience
The Bryntum Scheduler library has extensive and easy-to-use documentation that promotes a positive developer experience. This documentation includes guides on integration, customization, migration, APIs, and more.
In addition, on its examples page, you can browse different use cases highlighting features like drag and drop, filtering, grouping, tree view, and dependency lines. More importantly, this example page includes demos for integration with different frontend frameworks and server integration with PHP.
Features
Some of Bryntum Scheduler's most notable features include the following:
- Easy customization of the user interface
- Modern browser support for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge
- Integration with any server technology (including PHP, Java, ASP.NET)
- Integration with popular frontend frameworks
- Flexible API with documentation
- Resource grouping and task filtering
- Support for date indicators and global time ranges
- Ability to export to PDF, PNG, and Excel
Community Support
Bryntum has over 8,000 members in its community support forum, where members can ask questions, get direct help from the Bryntum team, report bugs, and request new features.
Cost and Licensing
The Bryntum Scheduler uses end user and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) licenses, and the cost of using the library starts at $850 USD.
You can find more information about the pricing options available on their pricing page.
Bryntum Scheduler Pro
The Bryntum Scheduler Pro is a Bryntum Scheduler but with a powerful Gantt scheduling engine that allows for asynchronous task rescheduling. This resource scheduler has all the features of the Bryntum Scheduler with even more advanced features, making it the most advanced JavaScript scheduler component. It's built with TypeScript and ES2020, and just like the Bryntum Scheduler, it can be integrated with different frontend frameworks, including React, Angular, and Vue.js.
Developer Experience
Just like the Bryntum Scheduler, it has well-written documentation and an examples page showing different demos of how to implement the pro features.
Features
Bryntum Scheduler Pro's most unique feature is that it supports automatic scheduling and can be used in conjunction with the Bryntum Gantt chart. It's the ideal choice for applications that require more than just a nice visual representation, such as the integration of complex scheduling scenarios.
The library has the same features as the Bryntum Scheduler, plus the following additional features:
- Partner with Bryntum Gantt for asynchronous task rescheduling
- Visualized nonworking time
- Calendar support for the project, event, and resource levels
- Resource histogram and utilization panels
- Travel time, timeline widget, and visual event progress indicator
More information on additional features can be found on Bryntum's website.
Community Support
The Bryntum Scheduler Pro library shares the same 8,000+ member community forum with the other Bryntum libraries. It's the most advanced scheduling library in this roundup, and you can collaborate with Bryntum's services team to add special features to your application.
Cost/Licensing
As is the case with the Bryntum Scheduler, the Bryntum Scheduler Pro uses end user and OEM licenses. The cost of using the library starts at $1,300 USD, which includes the license, source code, free upgrades, npm access, and forum support.
For more information about the Bryntum Scheduler Pro pricing, check out their pricing page.
FullCalendar
FullCalendar is a JavaScript calendar library and can be integrated with frontend frameworks, such as React, Vue.js, and Angular.
Developer Experience
It has a documentation page that provides a short guide on how to get started. The documentation has guides on initialization, integration, CSS customization, plugin packages, and more. It also includes guides on developing in React, Vue.js, and Angular.
In addition, its demonstration page showcases testable examples of its features.
Features
There are two versions of the library: standard and premium. The standard library adds a calendar component to your application, whereas the premium library, also known as FullCalender Scheduler, is a collection of premium plugins, such as timeline view, vertical resource view, and print optimization. FullCalender has over 300 settings built as separate modules to reduce file size, making it very lightweight in comparison to the other libraries in this roundup.
FullCalendar offers the following features:
- Powerful, lightweight open source library
- TypeScript support
- Customizable toolbar, theme, and sizing
- Day grid view, date navigation, clicking, and selecting
Some of its premium features include a timeline view, vertical resource view, and printer-friendly rendering.
Community Support
Possessing both premium and open source versions, FullCalendar will always have a free and open source core, thanks to over 10 years of being open source and over 120 contributors. Developers can get help, report bugs, request features, and contribute if they choose to do so.
Cost/Licensing
The standard version of FullCalendar is free and under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) license, while the premium version starts at $480 USD and is under the stock commercial license.
TOAST UI Calendar
The TOAST UI Calendar is an open source JavaScript calendar library and can be used in vanilla JavaScript, React, and Vue.js projects.
Developer Experience
The documentation for the TOAST UI Calendar comes in both English and Korean, and it is the only library on this list that offers its documentation in multiple languages.
The library also provides an extra API and example pages that show practical examples of implementing different features alongside the source code.
Features
Unlike the other libraries included in this roundup, the TOAST UI Calendar is completely free and open source.
Some of the most notable TOAST UI Calendar features include the following:
- Easily customizable view types, including daily, weekly, and monthly views
- Mouse-drag to adjust a schedule
- Ability to change the first day of a week
- Ability to drag and resize a schedule
However, the TOAST UI Calendar is not the most advanced one available, and it doesn't support resource grouping, task filtering, data binding, server-side integration, or the ability to export your calendar into a file format.
Community Support
The library is open source, with over 10,000 stars and 1,000 forks on the GitHub repository.
If you want to contribute to the library, check out their contributing and code of conduct guides.
Cost/Licensing
The library is free, open source, and licensed under MIT.
Kendo UI for Angular Scheduler
The Kendo UI library is a JavaScript library that includes dozens of fully functional widgets, including the Kendo UI Scheduler.
It offers four JavaScript UI libraries, including the Kendo UI for Angular, KendoReact, Kendo UI for Vue, and Kendo UI for jQuery.
Developer Experience
The library comes with over one hundred UI components, and because of this, it may not be the ideal library if you just want to utilize its scheduler. However, each component is well documented, and there are demos available for almost every feature.
Features
The Kendo UI Scheduler supports data binding and can be bound to both local and remote data. Another distinguishing feature is its right-to-left (RTL) support, which means that the scheduler component can be tailored to users who read from right to left.
Some of the Kendo UI's most notable features include the following:
- Day, week, work week, month, agenda, and timeline views
- Multiple resources and resource grouping
- Templates for appointments
- Time zone support
- Simple to customize look and feel
- Rich API for maximum flexibility
- Ability to export to PDF
- Accessibility, keyboard navigation, and RTL support
- Rich cross-browser and mobile support
- Responsive HTML 5 rendering
Community Support
Kendo UI has a community forum where users can report bugs, ask questions, and provide help to others. In addition, its forum has over 3.6 million members.
This library's components have earned a TrustRadius Top Rated Award for two years in a row.
Cost/Licensing
The cost of the library ranges from $999 USD to $2,199 USD and is licensed under the Apache License.
Syncfusion Scheduler
The Syncfusion Scheduler is one of the components offered by Syncfusion, a UI component suite for web, mobile, and desktop apps.
The web components offered by Syncfusion are designed to be lightweight, responsive, and modular. The Syncfusion Scheduler component supports all modern frameworks, including Angular, Vue.js, Blazor, JavaScript, and React.
Developer Experience
The learning curve for this library is short, as the library provides documentation, demos, and videos on how to utilize the scheduling component.
Features
The Syncfusion Scheduler includes four SASS-based themes built in: Material, Bootstrap, Fluent UI, Tailwind CSS, and High Contrast. A theme can be customized by overriding the SASS styling or by developing customized themes. If you're already using one of the previously mentioned themes in your project, there's no need to worry about integrating it into Syncfusion because the theme is built-in.
Other notable features include the following:
- Ability to view events in different ways, such as day, month, week, year, agenda, and timeline
- Real-time data synchronization
- Customizable UI, built-in template options: Material, Bootstrap, Fabric, Tailwind CSS, and High Contrast
- Supported browsers include Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, and IE11
- Completely accessible and keyboard-interactive
- Ability to export events as Excel or ICS files
- Responsive scheduler component
- Multiple views, templates, resources, grouping, time zone, and timescale
- Drag and drop, and resizing actions
Community Support
The Syncfusion Forum is the place where you can start threads and ask for help from other developers. Through the Feedback page, you can also provide feedback to the Syncfusion team, including requests for new features or bug reports. You can also vote on other developers' feedback, and this feedback will be ranked based on popularity.
Cost/Licensing
The price of the product ranges from $2,495 USD to $6,995 USD (for all components).
Conclusion
In this article, you learned about some of the best scheduling libraries you can use to build scheduling components in your frontend application regardless of the framework.
If you're looking for a powerful scheduler that can meet all your application's needs, including the option of working with a team of experts to add custom, unique features to your scheduler, check out Bryntum Scheduler or Bryntum Scheduler Pro.
Bryntum helps the world stay on schedule. Our component library offers a selection of high-quality, advanced UI controls for various frontend frameworks. Want to learn more? Try our scheduling and Gantt components at bryntum.com.
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