How ChartMetric Chose Simple Table
Discover how ChartMetric evaluated AG Grid, TanStack Table, Material UI Data Grid, and Material React Table before choosing Simple Table for their table-heavy product.
What data display challenges did you face before using Simple Table?
What other tables/grids did you consider, and why choose Simple Table?
AG Grid offered the most powerful and polished feature set, but its per-engineer pricing model was not scalable for a rapidly growing team.
TanStack Table was highly flexible and extensible, but required significant upfront engineering effort to build essential features from scratch.
Material UI Data Grid supported most of our needs and had a large community, but its per-engineer, annual pricing raised similar cost concerns.
Material React Table is open source with a larger community, but lacked some core features such as copy-and-paste support, and its UI felt outdated.
We chose Simple Table for its lightweight design, strong performance with virtualization, and clean, customizable UI. Although it initially missed some features, it is actively maintained, improves quickly with real-time feedback, and offers affordable fixed pricing with priority support.
How was Simple Table's support during implementation?
The support was highly responsive and very open to feedback. We were able to add most of the features we needed, and visible, straightforward issues were often fixed within a few days. This helped us ship with minimal schedule delays.
Even for larger feature requests, the team shared detailed timelines, which made it easier for us to plan our development work accordingly.
How customizable was Simple Table for Chartmetric's design?
Simple Table was highly customizable—around 99% of our needs were covered through built-in customization options such as CSS variable overrides, custom icons, and custom headers. For edge cases, we were able to rely on global class selectors.
This flexibility allowed us to fully apply our design system, including colors and spacing, and build tables that were well aligned with the rest of our application.
How much has Simple Table's pricing saved versus alternatives?
Assuming 20 product engineers use the table library, AG Grid Enterprise would cost $999 × 20 = $19,980 for a perpetual license, with additional costs likely for future major version upgrades.
In contrast, Simple Table Pro costs just $850 per year for the whole team. That's a first-year savings of over $19K, and the savings grow as the team expands.
What improvements (e.g., performance, UX) have you seen if any?
One area that could be improved is smoother animations—for example, when sorting, or expanding/collapsing rows or panels.
It would also be helpful to have a more programmatic API with examples covering various use cases on the site.