Vaadin Flow App - Collaboration Kit - Prime Licence Pricing

Web
1

If it’s not a tightly held secret - does anyone have any knowledge of the relative pricing moving from Vaadin “Free or Pro” to “Prime”.

I’ve prototyped an app in Vaadin Flow which makes use of the Collaboration Kit, but I’m unsure of the door I open in terms of cost once I exceed the 50 “Collaboration Kit” users per month included on the Free or Pro Licence.

Thanks to @thorstenstueker 's advocacy for all-things-java, I finally relented and tried Vaadin Flow. Whilst it is open source and free, there are plenty of reasons to level up and pay for additional features like the designer and advanced UI components.

Kind regards, Andrew

2

Oh, that’s no question, there is plenty of features that making use of pro interesting. for only having the features of Xojo Web - except the Designer - you have more than enough with Vaadin open source. But, you are right.

The problem is that Vaadin made this Collaboration Kit use tied to the open source and pro version restricted to 50 users. The next level of Vaadin is a bit more expensive and normally sold for bigger teams. When asking for the Price you will get an answer from Vaadin support. They are spending time for it and answering normally really fast. On the Vaadin website you find the Vaadin Chat, there you can ask what you want and need.

and you get much better Support Options with prime. Don’t forget they made the pro as low priced as possible and the open Source for free of charge even.

As Alternative you can write by self what you need to control, then you can save that money. It is always a question what the collaboration kit shall be able to do. While it is one Server there are many possibilities to do stuffs. You can, for example, actualize the Data let me say every 3 minutes. Also no problem. With your Database so, that you have this Data stored for every Session so you can do the collaboration with update timers without any problem also with the free Version for no money at all. all q question of what you need.

2 Likes
3

Just to clarify for other readers: the user limitation only exists if someone wants to use the “Collaboration Kit.”

Aside from that, although they mention monthly prices, payment can only be made on a yearly basis and commitment.

This isn’t unusual for our industry, but I generally prefer monthly pricing even if it’s more expensive. Clearly, I’ve been in large cooperations for too long, and the “cash is king” mentality has influenced me :slight_smile: .

4

Collaboration kit is made for document collaboration and simultaneously editing documents.

5

Ah OK !
Was wondering and hands gone & read vaadins site yet to see

Do you happen to know if the 50 user limit is removed as you move up in pricing tiers ?

6

The question is if he really needs it. The simple question. But he has to speak with them.

I was writing the needed collaboration stuffs by self for my chats and document management. If he would describe his project I could say something about

1 Like
7

@dickey Am I allowed to ask what you do with the App? While if it is for example for Chat there are other solutions than Collaboration Kit. Therefore I would be happy to get informations about it. TKS.

8

Thank you to everyone who replied,

I am on Australian time, so apologies if my replies have been delayed by my time zone.

To recap, Vaadin has 4 subscription tiers each with additional layers of functionality (Free, Pro, Prime and Ultimate).

I have requested pricing for the “Prime” tier for reference as it allows for unlimited Collaboration Kit users.

Vaadin reveal pricing for the Free and Pro tiers but on request only for the Prime and Ultimate tiers.

If a developer chose to use the pre-built Collaboration Kit, the Free and Pro tiers are limited to 50 Collaboration Kit users. The Prime and Ultimate Tiers feature unlimited Collaboration Kit users.

@thorstenstueker is correct:

  • most/very many projects can be managed on the free tier.
  • the Pro tier has compelling features, including additional UI components and a visual designer that for Xojo Web users would make the development experience more familiar.
  • developers do not need to use Collaboration Kit - they can easily code their own chat/document collaboration solutions.

I was merely wondering if the price difference from Pro to Prime offset the effort of additional coding versus using a pre-built component - which in the end is subjective for each developer.

For the sake of comparison on the basis of “getting started” toolset upfront costs:

Xojo Web:
Xojo Web $399 + Graffiti Suite $399 + LifeBoat $129 = $927 my minimum (and you’ll likely need something from Monkey Bread, say $500+) ~ $1500.

Vaadin Flow Web: (on a budget)

Free $0 + Intellij Idea Ultimate (from $85-$169) so under $200.

Vaadin Flow Web: (on Pro with Visual Designer)

Pro $1668 + Intellij Idea Ultimate (All Products Pack) because you might want some data wrangling tools as well ($148-$289) but say $1957 (which also includes 5 hours of Vaadins help, so in reality the tools are close to $1457).

For scalability, reliability, help resources (including consulting hours), no question Vaadin wins. Intellij is a winner hands down.

Even a premium version of everything for Vaadin is cheaper per annum than what I have paid on occasion for Xojo Web.

It should also be said, that even after a few days, you kinda find you don’t need the designer in Vaadin as the layout concepts are easy enough in code. The designer is efficient as it creates controls and variables in code, and let’s you imagine your UI, but business UI’s don’t vary so much you can’t easily imagine them in a a code sense. But the visual designer folds nicely into Intellij, which is a joy to use.

Kind regards, Andrew

2 Likes
9

Plus Jetbrains has some very nice discounts the longer you are using their products. That’s an (easy) way for a software company to incentive loyal customers. Some do it, some don’t, some don’t even have such plans in their mind.

IMHO their full suite is the way to go. I used their products already during my Xojo times (literally for year now). Though almost everything is integrated into Ultimate, I love for instance to work with DataGrip when I have to do a lot of database stuff.

Plus whenever you need Go, Rust, CSS, HTML it is just nice to have the complete suite at your hands. But for people on a budget (and/or preferring solely open source), NetBeans and Eclipse are nice as well. Only recently I had again a deeper look at Eclipse and it has some very nice features (better than I initially thought), but nothing really beats the well thought through helpers of jetBrains products, plus it integrates so well Git, AI tools, Gradle, Maven, and plugins for almost everything.

The “problem” with their IDEs are that they are so feature rich and “complex” that it takes you a good while (I would say 6 weeks at least) to feel “at home”. And once you will bump into their templates engine and that you understand that you can basically create abbreviations for all kinds of often used code pieces and that the IDE can auto-generate Getters / Setters, overwrite methods etc. all the sudden Java is no longer at all “verbose”. Well it actually is, but you don’t care :slight_smile:

I agree with you. During my experiments with Vaadin I really liked the idea of Pro, especially for the more feature rich controls. As you, I have my doubts that the visual designer is really needed, as drawing a good looking (even a complex UI) is a piece of cake and Vaadin generates PWAs automatically for you. Something not mentioned too often in reviews, but a nice to have.

1 Like
10

@Jeannot, for sure DataGrip is worth the upgrade price or even as a standalone purchase.

Kind regards, Andrew

1 Like
11

I second this. Their full suite is not very expensive really and renewals are cheaper. I used Ryder in preference to Visual Studio for C# development on macOS since VS for Mac is relatively anemic even after its recent rewrite. I have gotten acquainted with some of the other JetBrains tools, notably C-Lion. Now that I am spending my days on a Windows Server 2022 VPC I am back to using Visual Studio 2022 although I probably could have successfully held out for Ryder if I had felt strongly that it was that much better. I’d say it’s kind of a tie there, but that’s still quite a compliment. Ryder is just different enough that I’m slightly more comfortable in the VS 2022 environment, is all. Also, VS community edition is fine for my purposes and it’s free, whereas Ryder, while cheap, is not free.

(As an aside, I can’t figure out any substantive difference between Visual Studio Community and Pro. There are some extra features that I have no use for but not worth $$. And I don’t need the stuff in Enterprise edition either).

12

The Jetbrains IDE’s are not expensive. The all products pack for indie developers like you are one costs in from the third year on 200 Bucks including vat. That’s much software I get. I am using CLion, IntelliJ, Datagrip, AppCoder and Pycharm for my needs and I am really happy with this decision.

Since I am working most time with IntelliJ I am happy that all of the IDE Packages are similar in their UI and ease of use. So I guess it is a very good investment. But you can get many of them like Pycharm, IntelliJ and others as CE-Editions with a few small limitations for free while open Source.

In that Case you can for example use Vaadin for free and CodenameOne for free when Building local and Java Swing for free and you would have a No $$$ Toolchain for Desktop, Mobile and the WEB. Therefore I really like it.

And yes: Datagrip alone makes it worth to have even as VS user.

2 Likes
13

The entire Point is: when you started with Java Swing Vaadin and Codenameone is simple: the UI Coding is really close to Java Swing in both Cases. Vaadin was doing it so while Vaadin had the target market of Swing Applications which shall moved to the Web. CodenameOne is based on a lightweight UI toolkit which is very similar to java Swing.

So in last consequence: All platforms in a real professional quality for 0,- $. That is unbeatable. But I have to speak truths: of course I a using the all products pack company wide.

1 Like
14

The only thing for a former Xojo user is: he has to learn. Like you said: the IDE and also Java and the needed frameworks. It will cost time. But after you speeded that time you can do all the stuffs you could do with Xojo and its plugins without any need of a Plugin and without any need to even spend money. As a small tip beside: when using the CE-Edition of IntelliJIdea there is a Database Manager you can also get for free. Not as good as included Datagrip but good enough to say: there is nothing comparable in the Xojo world.

2 Likes
15

Bummer! I thought until today that only people who work with it as intensively as you understand why the upgrade is needed and I just don’t understand it with my 2-3 trips.

But for me, one constant with Microsoft products (including Azure) is that it’s not always obvious what you actually need. I often think to myself that the company just assumes that people in their confusion will just buy the best … :wink:

1 Like
16

There was a time when there was a little more difference but I think they keep folding more into Community or something. I used Pro at the old gig but it was VS 2019 and VS 2022 is different in its own right, so if there’s something missing IDK what it is. I figure I will use Community until I bump into a limitation, and then, if necessary, my client will pay for Enterprise if need be. They are not cheap that way. They keep saying, “whatever you need, Bob”, but I don’t like to take advantage of it just because I can.

17

4 posts were split to a new topic: Visual Studio on macOS Questions