How does that compare to https://github.com/paulhodel/jexcel ?
Both Jexcel and Handsontable are quite excellent when it comes to the amount of features, but they do have the same downsides: their enthusiastic creators implement any feature that they can dream off, ingoring the effects on performance and a growing code base that gets more complex every time.
If you're looking to create a spreadsheet app to compete with Excel or G. Sheets, don't look at DataGridXL. If you're looking for the fastest and most reliable editor for 2D or JSON data sets, choose DGXL :-)
I wanted to tackle the performance & reliability issues mainly. My thinking is that most users won't probably need formulas, merged cells, HTML markup. DGXL really shines for larger data sets. Excellent for numeric data input specifically.
Also, I think it implements Excel/G. Sheets controls a little better: when your users are Excel-experts, but keyboard controls work just a little different then they're used to, that's quite annoying. My goal is to stick as best as I can to the original controls.