This can be done fairly easily. I have an implementation in one of our applications. What I do is we add a standard text box and search button. Using MVVM on click it calls our search function. Get a reference to your tree view: var treeView = $(".treeview-control").data("kendoTreeView"); After this I collapse all nodes by using treeView.collapse(".k-item") then using a regex I loop through all of the treeview.items(). For matches I add css to highlight the node, if it is a folder I use treeView.findByUid(uid) and then treeView.expand...if it is a nested folder you can expand the parents,