I like Ext JS – the JavaScript framework by Sencha. But does it mean that our enterprise clients will be willing to pay $21K for 10 licenses of the recently released Sencha Complete: Team? It’ll be a hard sell for Sencha that plays in the field where all competing frameworks are free.
Such a hefty price tag may limit the exposure of Ext JS to only those enterprise shops that must use software products that are backed by their vendors and are commercially supported (for extra money, of course). Interestingly enough, Sencha even restricts the access to the evaluation copy of Sencha Complete. You have to have a team of 10 developers to request evaluation copy of this product. How many projects have you seen that had 10 JavaScript developers? Not many, right? It seems that Sencha Complete is meant only for the large enterprises where architecture groups approve Ext JS and Touch as THE framework to use.
I understand where this pricing is coming from though. Sencha as a company has started with some serious financial investments. If I’m not mistaken, more than $50 million were poured into the company over a couple of rounds of financing. Having this pile of cash is great for any software product, and Sencha’s engineers have proven that they can deliver. But there are time to scatter stones and there times to gather them. I guess, these venture capitalists what to see their money grow.
I still remember these expensive IDEs from the 90th, which were priced at $2K a pop. Where are they? I still remember Adobe’s LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) with the extraorbitant license prices that was not able to compete with Adobe’s own open sourced version of this product (BlazeDS). WHere is LCDS now? Do you also see what I see?
As I said, I like Ext JS framework (hopefully it’ll lose some weight in the future versions), and I like Sencha Touch for developing mobile applications. I wish Sencha’s salesmen to be convincing in selling the licenses of Sencha Complete: Team. Our company offers consulting services in development of enterprise Web applications, and Ext JS is one of our frameworks of choice. And the last thing I want is to see the market share of Sencha is diminishing because of the careless pricing policy.
Update: I hope that this blog has contributed to Sencha decision to lower the prices. As of February 2013, you can purchase a one-developer license of Sencha Complete for $995.
yakovfain.com 
It’s a shame is a good choise for us, but with new license model perphaps we need to look another options
Thanks for the post looking at the various licensing options for the Sencha frameworks. It’s worth mentioning that all of our frameworks are available as either standalone products *or* as a part of a bundle. You’re more than welcome to continue to download and purchase Ext JS or Sencha Touch as independent products. Our bundles give you a better price point to get multiple things from Sencha in one shot. For Sencha Complete, you get not only the frameworks, but Architect and more. Bought individually, you’d end up paying more than the bundle. But ultimately, the choice is yours (the developers!) of which method to get our products: individually or part of a bundle. And of course, Sencha Touch and Ext JS continue to stay available as open source under our dual licensing model, so if you’re building open source, you can use the products at no charge at all under the GPLv3 license. And even better Sencha Touch is, and will always, remain free for commercial use.
–Aditya
Sencha
I’m working on a book on Enterprise Web development for O’Reilly. We decided to include two chapters on Ext JS and Sencha Touch, but I’m not going to buy Sencha Complete.
Yakov, thank you for interesting post. Can you please explain why you choose ExtJS to use in production, but not Google Closure? Now i am looking which js framework to learn. Its more for learning best practice and see how to build enterprise application, and very interesting your opinion.
WHY ARE you using EXT!! Have you looked at DOJO? There is nothing in EXT that DOJO does not have. And DOJO has declarative markup just like Flex!!! There is no reason in my opinion to use anything else for Flex developers. Dojo is backed by large companies like IBM,
I second that. Came from flex and find dojo very easy transition and very capable complete framework. Plus free and you can fully modify the source to fit your needs.