Quick and handy guide in deciding which data controls to use :
DataGrid
- Great flexibility, provides data paging, editing and sorting features.
- Easy and quick to develop.
- Massive features and ease of development comes with a heavy penalty, which is performance.
DataList
- Template features, which provides more control on the look and feel
- Supports data editing
- Slightly longer to develop compared to DataGrid
- Not easy to provide paging and sorting support
- Better performance than DataGrid
Repeater
- Total control over rendererd HTML
- No built in support for editing, paging and sorting
- Longest to develop
- Best performance, but less features.