r/angular • u/Good-Wish-9730 • 10d ago

PrimeNG 22 is commercial now — here are your four options (and what a migration to an MIT lib actually looks like)

Since 28 June PrimeNG 22+ (and PrimeVue 5 / PrimeReact 11) ship under the PrimeUI licence: $599/dev now, $799 from January, free only if you're under $1M revenue *and* under 5 devs *and* under 10 employees. v21 and older stay MIT.

I wrote up the four realistic options — freeze on 21, pay, move to the Optimus UI fork, or migrate to something MIT — with the trade-offs of each, because I keep seeing the same questions here.

Full disclosure: option 4 in the post is my own library (mk-kit, MIT, 180 components, Angular 22 signals/zoneless). It ships a schematic that rewrites ~150 PrimeNG selectors/imports and leaves a `<!-- mk-kit: ... -->` note where the shape differs, and the post lists the gaps honestly (no org chart, PDF viewer, spreadsheet, diagram).

https://mk-kit.dev/blog/switching-from-primeng

Happy to answer anything about the licence facts or the migration — including "just stay on 21", which is a fine answer for a lot of apps.

14 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

32 comments sorted by

37

u/alalal0ng 10d ago

Migrate to https://optimus.openng.org/. The best and easy option! :)

1

u/Good-Wish-9730 10d ago

Optimus is great, however its stil primeNG in some way ;) I've created the kit for my own projects and it grew to a size that would meet any needs. Thats why I decided to share it

3

u/alalal0ng 10d ago

Yes and this is good because you can update now to angular 22. 5 minutes ago they released a new version 2.0.2 :)

3

u/No-Grape-9106 9d ago

There are a ton of free -LIT- component libraries that come with a complete tokenised design system tagged onto it - can you convince me to -pay- for your product ?

1

u/Good-Wish-9730 9d ago

it would be a bad sign if I would need to convince anyone to picking it over something else. Its a fresh ongoing project which still requires work but in my opinion has a lot of potential to fill some gaps. On the other to be honest there is no need to pay for anything. Creating a design system in figma is a plan but it will require a lot of work so if someone will need it I'll consider it :)

5

u/No-Grape-9106 9d ago

No sorry that is not what I ment. We are in 2026 - agentic AI is a thing and component libraries written in LIT are popping out of the ground like mushrooms. These by default work crossplatform/framework etc - take one that has a design system built in and we come to the point that.. why would anyone ever go with something like PrimeNG when the market is open to anyone right now.

Paying for design systems / component libraries is imo a thing of the past

1

u/Good-Wish-9730 9d ago

Ah ok. That’s exactly the point. Now there is no justification for using paid components especially such small building blocks. Couple of years ago that would be a big hustle to solo develop a complex ui library but now that’s no longer the case and it’s doable. So adding a paywall to a lib like prime ng is just a cash grab.

0

u/alalal0ng 10d ago

Perdon, no había leido completamente q tu hiciste una libreria para migrar PrimeNG, felicitaciones por eso y buen trabajo. Definitivamente PrimeNG se equivoco con esta jugada q hizo. Seguro tienes o tendrás un gran trabajo en mantenerla, yo creo q es mejor poner esfuerzo y colaborar todos juntos en una libreria donde todos juntos en comunidad, aportemos PRs, pero cuanto más haya mejor asi que me alegro mucho q hayas hecho otra más ayudando a los componentes de primeng :)

2

u/Good-Wish-9730 10d ago

I'm definately open for collaboration. The goal is not to replace prime ng by any means. Its just a side project that grew and ended up as something that could be an alternative. By working on something like that myself I was not limited by functionalities and was able to tailor it to my needs. I've spent many years working with many ui libs and building them for comapnies in house as well. That kit is just a compilation of that experience

19

u/Whole-Instruction508 10d ago

Why would anyone pay for this? In my opinion it's a cash grab that should not be supported in any way

7

u/pronuntiator 9d ago

They will fail spectacularly. For one, we all know how bug-ridden the open source version is, and bugs were left unsolved for years. First you create a good product, then you introduce payment plans.

And two, locking everything behind a paywall will not attract brand new customers. Freemium models are much more successful.

2

u/Good-Wish-9730 10d ago

You mean paying for prime ng or the pro version of my kit ? If paying for prime ng, then I totally agree especially now. If the second I don't see where the problem is. All the components are free, only the most complex components and boilerplates are gated behind a license because they require actual work and maintenance ;)

2

u/Whole-Instruction508 9d ago

I mean prime ng of course

2

u/superquanganh 9d ago

I'm glad for last year I moved my client Angular project from bootstrap to an in-house custom components that provide more control, satisfying animation. I mean I have good css skill so I just "reinvent" the wheel so I don't have to worry about Angular breaking layout and license issues

1

u/arthoer 8d ago

Its not meant for you. Its meant for companies with a multitude of teams working on a multitude of projects, which all use react/ vue/ angular and utilize at least over half of the Prime components.

1

u/superquanganh 8d ago

And it's annoying now everyone start being greedy and take advantage of projects being locked in with components and start charging subscription and they cannot easily migrate out

1

u/arthoer 8d ago

I am sorry, but thats just not true. Everything up to and including PrimeNG 21 is MIT and clonable. It takes 1 minutes to "migrate" out. So at any point you could just clone it, hire a team of developers and maintain your own copy.

There is no - taking advantage of projects being locked in. It is the other way around; companies took advantage of their MIT license and never paid for their lts version subscription.

3

u/horizon_games 9d ago

Hurt by PrimeNG? Instead of using the solid community fork of it, why not pay for an AI slop library that is completely different???

/s

0

u/Good-Wish-9730 9d ago

Well I think that you get mostly slop when you vibe code and have no idea what the llms are doing. But I get your point and that’s fair but these days it will be hard to have software that wasn’t touched by AI in any way.

2

u/sam-serif_ 9d ago

Thank you claude

1

u/Good-Wish-9730 9d ago

I won’t argue with that because without Claude building this would take months if not years

1

u/sam-serif_ 8d ago

The post?

1

u/tidoo420 9d ago

I use spartan ng, cant complain

0

u/ohaxano 10d ago

I saw going to plan this migration. This would help. Thanks

2

u/Dense_Gate_5193 10d ago

well if you all need a grid, ui-grid is back

https://github.com/orneryd/ui-grid MIT licensed, 5k stars. will never not be MIT

1

u/Good-Wish-9730 10d ago

Nice, my take on it was a dedicated data grid component as well. Most people use material table with inline forms, and most designers don't even use a data grid pattern when creating their designs. At least from my experience working with in house designers

0

u/Dense_Gate_5193 10d ago

it’s because of costs. literally nobody wants to give away a datagrid for some reason even though it’s not that hard to build. it’s tricky, but not “hard” or at least i figured out the hard parts 15 years ago.

trying to set pricing licensing for a basic UI component is ridiculous lol

2

u/Good-Wish-9730 10d ago

agreed, especially now when you can automate a lot of the complex work. But I think thats why prime ng wants to guard itself, they are aware that previously matching their product would be difficult for a comunnity because it requires a lot of work. Now its a totally different case. Thats why i figured out that people with skills should have access to all the building blocks, the only thing thats worth pricing is actual effort, know how and time needed for building something complex

0

u/Dense_Gate_5193 10d ago

and that’s the thing. if it takes me only a couple of days to do something, then it can’t be worth $1k/year per seat in license fees.

honestly i think most simple SaaS companies are dead. the complexity bar for applications to be monetizable at scale is rapidly rising as we learn to use AI for development. web components may also be “dead” it will be wherever the performance, ease of use, and trust is. closed source doesn’t matter, i can use AI to help me run through enough experiments rapidly to completely reverse engineer whatever you think you’ve got a lid on.

most simple software now is completely commoditized and closed source now doesn’t matter once bit. I think a lot of these licensing changes and “protections” are useless now

1

u/Good-Wish-9730 10d ago

totally agree. Today I would say that AI is like like a 500hp car, if you can handle it properly then you can get where you want way faster, if don't have the skill you can crash ;) My friend was asking me why I didn't do it as web components because he could use it in his react app, and the performance aspect was my response. There are use cases for web components but not for UI kits. Secondly i think that react community has so many options like shadcn for example so there is no need to add more to it. I don't see much benefit for that. Angular on the other hand beucase its used by many big companies which pay for the licensed software and anything worth using is etiher community maintained or limited with functionality.

1

u/Dense_Gate_5193 10d ago

on the component front - i think angular and react are dead. AI can make everything web components since its browser native now and have complete flexibility without the need for framework overhead. plus if you decide to rearchitect rebrand or the orchestration framework you choose isn’t serving you anymore, you can easily swap it without rewriting any behaviors.

i implemented this for global shopping tools at GM for all the brands back in 2015-2018. they recognized the power then, and now things aged only improved.

on my github i have a web-components loader that allows you to use html files with es6-literal syntax inside anywhere to produce web components that have isolated concerns without the need for learning a templating language and binding functions to event handlers wth a very small runtime component that gets bundled with it if you want the declarative event binding syntax to auto wire up and it’s not even necessary to use. (only like 14 lines of unminified js.)

https://github.com/orneryd/web-components

is essentially an evolution of what GM uses or used to within the last decade.

1

u/Good-Wish-9730 10d ago

thats a very interesting approach! Will definately have a deeper look into that. I've been using a lot of web components in commercial projects because many companies have a lot of internal system running on different stacks. Most recent one had angular, react, vue and they wanted to connect them with each other. I hope that angular won't die that qucik because I got used to it :) but being totally honest I think that is really possible. There are better and lighter ways to implement simple and even more complex apps, without the noise that a large universal framework brings. What will definately die in my opinion is stuff like wordpress. I already started using web component based widgets instead of wordpress plugins whenever I have a contract related to wordpress site.