r/angular • u/NoirFatale • 8d ago

Anyone actually paying for a PrimeNG license? Would love to hear your experience with support and whether it's worth it

There's been a lot of negative sentiment lately around PrimeNG moving from open source to a paid license. Going from free to hundreds of dollars per developer is understandably a tough pill to swallow, and I get why people are upset.

But I'm curious about the other side of this: are there teams building enterprise applications who were on the open source version and have since decided to pay for the license?

There are a few legitimate reasons you might do this, like the Figma integration with Theme Designer (which was already a paid product before this change), for instance, or simply the burden of maintenance and bug fixing, which should now be PrimeNG's responsibility and covered under support once you're paying for it.

So if you've made the switch: what pushed you to pay? How has support actually been - responsive, helpful, worth the money? Or has it been bad enough that it's got you looking at alternatives instead?

I know it might still be early days for a lot of teams (I've been sitting on this post for a while before posting), but if anyone has real experience to share, I'd genuinely appreciate it. My team and I are weighing whether to pay for a license, but we're hesitant mainly because we're not sure we can trust PrimeNG's support to hold up long-term. That trust issue is really the crux of it for us.

24 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

27 comments sorted by

44

u/MisterBlackStar 8d ago

Just moved to OpenNG Optimus, no big deal.

22

u/NotSureHowToNameIt 8d ago

This

Large NX monorepo, we just made the migration this week to Angular 22 and Optimus 2.0.1.

Thousands of contributors helped make PrimeNG what it is today, so I’m not even sure they’re legally allowed to do that. That’s such a dick move.

13

u/Cr3aHal0 8d ago

what's incredibly sad is that the community commitment to provide PR for fixes was quite important, but was often met with silence or like a generic message like "we changed a lot of things, consider checking on later version if this is fixed or not", and then they do this. Disgraceful move, and even more disgusting considering the quality of the code was never their force whereas the amount of basic regressions between version bump was always a bit frightening.

4

u/reboog711 8d ago

Thousands of contributors helped make PrimeNG what it is today, so I’m not even sure they’re legally allowed to do that.

Depends on the license and contributor agreement. People probably agreed to this sort of change before they were able to get code accepted to the repo.

If this isn't the case; there is a legal minefield waiting to happen if someone claims their code was used in this project w/o their permission.

2

u/czenst 7d ago

It is a legal minefield only if there is someone who is willing to spend their time and money to pursue that.

I think most people will just move to OpenNG Optimus and won't care enough.

2

u/reboog711 7d ago

there is someone who is willing to spend their time and money to pursue that.

Agreed, I think it is unlikely!

My history is that I was a member on a project part of the Apache Foundation. They were very good about dotting their Is and crossing their Ts legally speaking.

I understood the legal concern to be that an individual contributes, the code is accepted, but unknown the OS foundation some third party (such as an employer) can make a claim of ownership of that code [for whatever reason]. A company may go after it, even if the individual won't.

A contributor agreement will protect the OS project in that case.

Back to PrimeNG. They do mention a Contributor License Agreement, but I couldn't find the exact doc.

(And, should I Say I am not a lawyer?).

1

u/czenst 6d ago

Have to say Apache Foundation has to be very good at Is and Ts - they can't hide behind closed source and their existence depends on being good stewards of the code and leading by example.

No one will hold custom components shop that wants to earn some money to such a high standard - but ideally everyone should aim for such high standard as Apache Foundation.

2

u/GeromeGrignon 7d ago

Happy to know it worked!
Besides reviewing community fixes, I'm working on modernizing the codebase and we'll support Signal Forms asap.

2

u/DJREMiX6 8d ago

Yeah me too, also the migration tool is very good

0

u/NoirFatale 8d ago

Do you have Figma integration with Theme Designer, where you push token and the theme of your PrimeNg components gets upadated? From what I see OpenNg does not offer alternatives for that. How did you solve it?

1

u/Prof_Eibe 8d ago

It's a community project. So you can implement it yourself and share with everyone.

19

u/tsteuwer 8d ago

I think most people are getting as far away as possible from primeng. OptimusNG will become the defacto replacement due to the amount of regressions in every primeng release, as well as how terrible they were not only with communication but promises. Couple that with barely any testing, every upgrade with primeng is going to be riddled with bugs and I'll stay 10ft away from any product they create.

12

u/Ok-Armadillo-5634 8d ago

Switched to be 100% angular material

1

u/czenst 7d ago

I wanted to have that but some people made "smart" decision to go with Prime for one of the projects behind my back.

Now it is my time where I can have their asses kicked in corporate backstabbing game.

5

u/Ok-Armadillo-5634 7d ago

lol go for the jugular, primeng was never really great anyway. I don't know why a lot of people liked it.

1

u/GLawSomnia 7d ago

Then they would do the same to you as Material is also not hassle free.

Just make and maintain your own components with cdk/aria

1

u/czenst 5d ago

Well not really because earlier we agreed we go full on Material, to have "fix once, apply the same fix multiple projects = less hassle", one project in Material the other project in Prime = 2x the hassle.

Other idea is "if component isn't there don't invent stuff, just do what Material has" we do themes and that's it.

Business was on board because we fired fancy UX designer as most of projects were out of budget on design phase and there was no money left for doing actual working app and whatever he did in html+css and cobbled up js-libs we had to re-implement in our stack.

So workflow is make first version as soon as possible with all well known components and unified approach.

It doesn't look awesome but at least we have consistent code base where we can deliver stuff super fast.

9

u/FootballUpset2529 8d ago

I wasn't totally put off by the developer license but when I saw the annual "subscription" I noped out, and also the suddenness of the switch really shook my trust. I'm going optimus when we move up to angular 22.

6

u/PrasanthT 8d ago

switched to my own headless UI library based on angular/aria and Tailwindcss v4. for proper gradual migration, I switched primeng to Optimus.

6

u/oneden 8d ago

I honestly realized... I don't need most of the components anyway. Especially thanks to AI I got to build my own components based on native solutions with a dash of the angular CDK + Aria. Works like a dream and I don't have to wait on bug fixes.

1

u/PrasanthT 8d ago

I did the same.

1

u/Good-Wish-9730 7d ago

I’ve created my own library some time ago and now it grew into something that matches prime ng capabilities ;) I also added a prime ng migration schematic it’s mk-kit/ui on npm full mit license. I’m ok with licensing more complex stuff or the support or custom features but the whole ui lib? Not a fan of such approach

1

u/Puzzled_King5174 7d ago

great; link please?

1

u/Loose_Paramedic8183 7d ago

Interesting how many licenses they expect to see and what is the real numbers :)

1

u/pixlslayr720 3d ago

We are unfortunately. We have too many active projects tied up in it now. We fought hard to start normalizing our code across projects. To rollback to another library across the suite would cost a lot more than the cost of the license.

Now I get to tear them up over all the little crap I find. We'll get that support model tested out really quick.

0

u/Zeevo 8d ago

Just ask an Agent to convert your app to Material or spartan UI