Best React UI Component Libraries

In this article, we’ll review some of the best React UI component libraries and explain how to choose the right one for you. The article is written primarily for beginner React developers, but you’ll need some familiarity with React’s specific terms.

React powers the user interfaces (UI) of more than 10 million websites around the world. While the base library of React is solid, there are multiple component libraries filled with valuable design elements for your React app or web development project.

Let’s look at the most popular React UI libraries on GitHub to help you find the best React UI library for your current project. We’ll analyze their application in development, bring examples, and look at their popularity among developers based on usage statistics from GitHub and npm.

Let’s start with why you should be thinking about using a React UI library in the first place. But If you want to get started with the list right away, jump here.

Key Takeaways

• React UI component libraries offer numerous benefits including time savings, beginner-friendly design, customizable components, and proven compatibility across devices.
• MUI (formerly Material-UI) is highly popular with over 745,000 projects on GitHub, offering a comprehensive design system based on Google’s Material Design.
• React-Bootstrap is notable for its compatibility with Bootstrap themes and its use in over 605,000 GitHub projects, making it ideal for both beginners and experienced developers familiar with Bootstrap.
• Ant Design, utilized by giants like Alibaba and over 255,000 GitHub projects, is tailored for enterprise-level applications with extensive documentation and customization options.
• Chakra UI stands out for its simplicity and focus on accessibility, serving over 20,000 projects on GitHub with a strong emphasis on creating efficient user experiences with less coding.
• Theme UI and Rebass are geared towards developers looking to build custom themes and design systems with a minimalistic approach, highlighting flexibility and ease of use.
• Blueprint is optimized for complex, data-dense desktop applications, not fully mobile-responsive, used in over 9,800 projects, and offers extensive customization options for developing unique user interfaces.

Do I need a React UI Component Library?

Each React component library has pros and cons, which we’ll discuss in more detail below. But in general, using any component library can have many benefits that will help you when working on your React project:

Advantages of Using a React UI Library

• Beginner-friendly: A UI library React beginners can utilize comes with prebuilt components like buttons, form fields, etc. So, as a beginner, you won’t have to figure out how to create any of the necessary elements from scratch. Instead, you can focus on the implementation and customization with the help of the documentation.
• Faster prototyping: With ready-made React components at your disposal, you can quickly create several functioning prototypes. This means you can prove that the design concept is functioning without spending too much time on any details.
• Saves time: Using a React component library saves time not only when prototyping, but also when already working on your React project. It enables you to write less code, as you won’t have to write all the styles yourself.
• Recognizable components by users: Innovation, to a certain extent, helps your project stand out. However, too much innovation in designing UX/UI can put users off. As the UI elements in libraries are designed to be universal, they won’t cause any friction for your users.
• Customizable components: Despite being universal, most elements can be customized, at least to some extent. Each library gives you a different amount of control over the customization, but you’ll be able to ensure your website doesn’t look too much like many others.
• Proven compatibility across devices: Most prebuilt UI components are mobile-responsive by default, so you won’t have to put much extra effort into ensuring your React project works on different types of devices.
• Accessible by default: Most popular React UI component libraries have built-in accessibility features or even fully adhere to WCAG or other standards and best practices. Thanks to this, you won’t have to worry about self-coding semantic tags or keyboard navigation.
• Crowd-sourced: UI component libraries often have their communities centered around GitHub. This means users can raise issues, request features, and easily become library contributors.

Disadvantages of Using a React UI Library

Despite these many upsides, even the best React UI component libraries have some downsides that you should consider before you commit to one:

• Customizing components can be difficult. Depending on the specific library you choose, the ease of customizing components differs. With some React libraries, you get primitive components that are meant to be heavily customized by the developer, but with others, getting the result you want can be tricky.
• Similar web design with other sites. Each React UI library has its design system, so if you choose to use a popular library but don’t customize the components or theme enough, your site can end up looking very similar to other sites using the same library — in some cases, even unoriginal. However, depending on your project, that might not be an issue at all.
• Support relies on the community. Most React UI libraries don’t offer official support but instead guide their users to Stack Overflow, GitHub, Discord, or other similar channels. With less popular libraries, the community is smaller, and getting help can be more complicated.

Since you now understand the pros and cons of using React UI component libraries, let’s take a look at the most popular libraries based on GitHub statistics. We’ve listed the libraries based on their number of active projects on GitHub, starting with the most popular.

By the end of this post, you will be able to decide what is the best UI library for React projects.

1. Radix Primitives

Radix UI is a modern component library with a large number of unstyled, accessible React components. Unlike many other component libraries, Radix UI focuses on delivering primitives that allow developers to design from scratch. Radix UI offers four main libraries to facilitate UI development:

• Radix Themes: This library provides customizable themes that work seamlessly with Radix Primitives.
• Radix Primitives: These are the core unstyled and accessible UI components.
• Radix Colors: A collection of carefully crafted color palettes for UI components.
• Radix Icons: A set of open-source icons designed to be used alongside Radix Primitives or as standalone elements in any React project.

Radix Primitives is the main part of this collection, which provides low-level building blocks to create custom UIs while ensuring accessibility, interactivity, and keyboard support. Radix Primitives is almost built using TypeScript and has more than 8.9 million weekly NPM downloads.

Features of Radix Primitives

• All primitives are designed with accessibility in mind. They meet WCAG standards to ensure everyone uses your application.
• Radix Primitives follow the WAI-ARIA guidelines.
• Lightweight and optimized for performance.
• Provide sensible focus management defaults.
• All components share a similar API.
• Each component is its own independently versioned package.

With Radix Primitives, you can focus on creating unique designs without sacrificing accessibility or performance. The picture below shows some commonly used primitives like dialogs, dropdown menus, and sliders:

2. MUI (formerly Material-UI)

MUI is a straightforward and customizable React components library based on Google’s Material Design. It is used by more than 4.1 million weekly NPM downloads and is built on 55.8% TypeScript and 44% JavaScript. MUI is not simply a component library but an entire design system. It features a wholesome system of guidelines, design principles, and best practices of UI design.

Features of MUI

• It offers a large number of React components that are suitable for a wide variety of general-purpose development projects.
• You can use the existing Material Design components, customize them, or create your own design system.
• Based on Google’s Material Design system and widely used across Google’s platforms.
• MUI components can have a distinctly Google-like look and feel, making it an ideal choice for building Android apps.
• Provide a detailed documentation.

However, the customization options of this library are limited, and your app might end up looking like it is associated with Google. Still, seeing how much MUI is used and how many GitHub stars it has, it’s one of the best UI library for React projects.

MUI is used by medium.com, Scale AI, and UNIQLO, among others. If you’d like to consider an alternative, try Enlite Prime, which is covered in our guide to the best Material UI themes, is also a good option.

The picture below shows an example of MUI rating variants.

You can install the MUI components library using npm or Yarn:

// npm
npm install @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

// yarn
yarn add @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

3. Ant Design

Ant Design is another popular React UI library created by Alibaba, and it has over 1.6 million weekly NPM downloads. It describes itself as a design system for enterprise-level users. Ant Design offers a large set of high-quality components for building entire UI frameworks quickly — or you can just use individual components. The library is built on 99.2% TypeScript and 0.8% unspecified code.

Features of Ant Design

• It’s pretty easy to get started with Ant Design since it has great documentation that includes plenty of guidelines, examples, and variants.
• It’s also a robust platform for customizing the existing components and themes.
• It supports many third-party React libraries and several of its own products, like AntV Data Visualization, Ant Design Charts, and Ant Design Mobile.
• Although Ant Design seems like a huge library to fully include (at 1.2 MB), it’s tree-shakable. So, the production build will only include the used components.

In addition to Alibaba, Ant Design is also used by the likes of Lenovo and Toyota, showing it’s a great choice for high-level business projects. It also has more stars on GitHub than React Bootstrap, which proves its greatness.

The image below shows an example of icon variants in Ant Design.

You can install Ant Design components using npm or Yarn:

// npm
npm install @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

// yarn
yarn add @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

4. React-Bootstrap

React-Bootstrap is one of the oldest React UI component libraries in GitHub, and it has more than 1.2 million weekly NPM downloads. It’s a rebuild of the popular frontend framework Bootstrap using React. The library is mainly built on 65.3% TypeScript and 22% JavaScript. The latest release of React-Bootstrap is compatible with the most recent Bootstrap version, 5.3.

Features of React Bootstrap

• The library consists of ready-made components that are fully responsive and accessible.
• All the design elements are also highly customizable.
• React-Bootstrap can be used for UI foundations, websites, and designing applications.
• It’s compatible with thousands of Bootstrap themes.
• You can easily create custom themes if you know the classes and variants defined in Bootstrap.
• You can only import the individual components you need, which can help minimize the total amount of code.
• It is a beginner-friendly library and has good documentation.

On the downside, if you’re familiar with Bootstrap and decide to choose React-Bootstrap for your project, you’ll have to learn a new API. Moreover, compared to other libraries, like MUI or Ant Design, React-Bootstrap has a smaller set of components.

However, React-Bootstrap’s popularity is a clear sign that it’s a great choice for a wide variety of development projects. And if you’re already familiar with Bootstrap, it can feel natural to use React-Bootstrap, too.

The image below shows an example of React-Bootstrap’s button variants.

You can install React Bootstrap using npm or yarn:

// npm
npm install @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

// yarn
yarn add @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

5. Chakra UI

With over 586,000 weekly NPM downloads, Chakra UI offers straightforward, modular, and customizable React components for web development. Chakra UI codebase comprises 62.1% MDX, 34.8% TypeScript, and 3.1% JavaScript.

Features of Chakra UI

• All the components are optimized for dark mode.
• Fully compatible with the WAI-ARIA accessibility standard.
• Customizing the components and themes is quite easy, thanks to style props.
• It focuses a lot on the process of development, with a promise that you’ll spend less time writing code and more time building a great user experience.
• Provide a good documentation.

However, Chakra UI still lacks some features and components compared to libraries like React Bootstrap. So, it is best used for small to medium-sized development projects requiring only a few components or advanced features.

The image below shows an example of checkbox variants in Chakra UI.

You can install Chakra UI and its components using npm or Yarn:

// npm
npm install antd

// yarn
yarn add antd

6. Mantine

Mantine is another popular React component library with more than 500,000 weekly NPM downloads. It provides over 100 customizable and accessible components, hooks, and utilities for building modern web applications. Mantine supports TypeScript out of the box and works well with popular CSS-in-JS libraries. Mantine codebase comprises 79.9% TypeScript, 15.1 MDX and 4.9% CSS.

Features of Mantine

• Free and open source.
• Offers a diverse set of components, from basic UI elements like buttons to more complex elements like notifications and modals.
• All components and hooks export types.
• Supports all modern frameworks: Next.js, Remix.
• Includes a highly flexible theming system.
• Supports dark mode out of the box.

Mantine has over 200 contributors and is rapidly growing in popularity, making it a strong choice for modern React development. The below image shows some popular Mantine components:

You can install Mantine using npm or Yarn:

// npm
npm install @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

// yarn
yarn add @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

7. Shadcn

Shadcn is one of the latest React components libraries in the market. Although it has been only a year since Shadcn was introduced, it already has more than 84,000 weekly NPM downloads. Shadcn is built on top of Radix Primitives. Hence, all the components are unstyled and accessibility-focused, allowing developers to style their components based on unique requirements. Shadcn is built on 91.4% TypeScript, 7% MDX, and 1.1% CSS.

Features of Shadcn

• Shadcn comes with full TypeScript support, providing developers with strong type safety.
• Shadcn components are highly composable.
• Components are unstyled. Hence, they can be easily themable.
• Shadcn works well with popular animation libraries.
• Uses tree-shaking, ensuring that only the components you use are included in the final bundle.
• It provides utility hooks that can simplify state management and handle UI interactions.

Shadcn is ideal for developers who want to build accessible, flexible, and high-performance UIs with full control over styling and theming. The below image shows an example of Shadcn mail components:

You can get started with Shadcn using npm or Yarn:

// npm
npm install @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

// yarn
yarn add @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

8. Reactstrap

With more than 484,000 weekly NPM downloads, Reactstrap offers straightforward and self-contained components for Bootstrap 5.1. Its’ UI elements are responsive, simple in design, and applicable to a variety of projects. Reactstrap codebase comprises 82.4% JavaScript, 16.5% TypeScript, and 1.1% unspecified code.

Features of Reactstrap

• You can use Reactstrap for complete UI development or only use individual components.
• It offers great flexibility and prebuilt validation, which is great for quickly building beautiful forms with a great user experience.
• Beginners can easily get started with Reactstrap since it is a straightforward library.
• There’s a decent community around Reactstrap.
• Many free and premium Reactstrap themes are available to speed up your development process.

All in all, Reactstrap is similar to React-Bootstrap, with a few small differences. If you like working with Bootstrap, you can easily choose either for your project.

But, as Reactstrap is a relatively new React component library compared to other mentions on this list, it has a small collection of components. Then again, this can be a good thing if you’re aiming for a simple design. The official Reactstrap documentation is thorough but mainly consists of code and only has a few explanations.

The image below shows an example of button dropdown variants in Reactstrap.

To use Reactstrap, you first need to install Bootstrap:

// npm
npm install antd

// yarn
yarn add antd

Then you can install Reactstrap using npm or Yarn:

// npm
npm install @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

// yarn
yarn add @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

9. Semantic UI React

Used by more than 266,000 weekly NPM downloads, Semantic UI React is a frontend component library for ready-made, mobile-responsive solutions. As the name suggests, it’s the official React integration of the Semantic UI development framework, known for its responsive, human-friendly HTML code. It is built on 99.9% JavaScript and 0.1% TypeScript.

Features of Semantic UI React

• The Semantic UI React library provides multiple variations for each component. So, you’ll most likely be able to find an existing component suitable for your use case.
• You can customize each component to fit your design by modifying the SCSS stylesheets.
• You can use the Semantic UI React library for your project or only install individual elements.
• Since Semantic UI was created for web development, Semantic UI React is also more suited for web development projects than mobile apps.

However, the original Semantic UI framework is no longer maintained, and not all the components are fully accessible by default.

Nevertheless, Semantic UI React is going strong and is a good choice for beginners looking to build responsive web apps. It has human-friendly code, great documentation with plenty of examples, and a code sandbox for each component.

The image below shows an example of label components in Semantic UI React.

YYou can install Semantic UI React components using npm or Yarn:

// npm
npm install antd

// yarn
yarn add antd

After install, import the minified CSS file in your app’s entry file:

// npm
npm install @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

// yarn
yarn add @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

10. Blueprint

With more than 181,000 weekly NPM downloads, Blueprint features over 40 modern-day components in its library. The main focus of Blueprint is building a React UI for complex data-dense desktop applications; therefore, it’s not fully mobile-responsive. Blueprint is built on 89.1% TypeScript, 7.6% SCSS, 2.7% JavaScript, 0.3% Shell, and 0.2% HTML.

Features of Blueprint

• Blueprint allows you to install the core package with fundamental components and add additional component packages as needed, such as Datetime, Icons, and Table packages.
• You can import only the necessary components, optimizing your project’s bundle size.
• Offers only a default light theme and a dark mode theme, with no additional prebuilt themes.
• Provides ample room for customization, allowing you to modify classes, color themes, and typography.
• Blueprint has comprehensive and detailed documentation.

Blueprint is probably the best React component library for you if you want to build a data-dense desktop application with beautiful pre-made components. But, like Theme UI and Rebass, the community isn’t very large yet, so finding help could be challenging. And, of course, it’s not very suitable for mobile apps.

The image below shows an example of icon variants in Blueprint.

You can get started with Blueprint’s core components and install them using npm or Yarn:

// npm
npm install antd

// yarn
yarn add antd

Create Unique Designs by Using a React UI Component Library

Building an application can be much more straightforward using ready-made React UI components. By customizing the components to your specific needs, you won’t have to start from scratch and can create a unique design quickly.

Here’s a quick summary of the suitable use cases of the libraries covered in this post:

• For a large number of prebuilt components and great documentation, you should look into MUI, Ant Design, Semantic UI React, Blueprint, and Mantine.
• If you’re looking for a library for mobile app development, then try MUI, React-Bootstrap, and Ant Design. You can use these for both Android and iOS apps, although MUI is better suited for Android.
• Blueprint is especially suitable for data-dense desktop applications.
• If out-of-the-box accessibility is important in your React project, then you should consider MUI, React-Bootstrap, Chakra UI, or Blueprint.
• React-Bootstrap and Reactstrap are good for compatibility with Bootstrap themes.
• For primitive components, take a look at Radix Primitives and Shadcn.

We recommend you explore the most popular React UI component libraries covered in this post. They’ll help kickstart your React app or web development project.

Which React component libraries have you used and which one from the list would you use for your next project? Share your thoughts on Twitter and tag @sitepointdotcom.

FAQs About React UI Component Libraries and Material UI

What Is a React UI Component Library?

A React UI component library is a collection of pre-designed, reusable user interface elements (components) for building web applications using React. These libraries provide a consistent and efficient way to create a user interface with React.

Why Should I Use a React UI Component Library?

Using a UI component library saves time and effort in UI development by providing ready-made, well-tested components that follow best practices. It ensures a consistent look and feel throughout your application and can improve development speed.

What Are Some Popular React UI Component Libraries?

Popular React component libraries include MUI, Ant Design, Radix Primitives, Mantine, Shadcn, React-Bootstrap, and Chakra UI, among others.

Are React UI Component Libraries Compatible with State Management Libraries Like Redux or Mobx?

Yes, React UI component libraries are compatible with various state management solutions. You can integrate them into your application regardless of the state management library you choose.

Are UI Component Libraries Mobile-Responsive?

Yes, most React component libraries are designed to be responsive, ensuring that the components adapt well to different screen sizes, including mobile devices and tablets.

What Is Material-UI, and Why Should I Consider Using It in My React App?

Material-UI is a popular open-source library that provides a set of customizable, high-quality React components following the Material Design guidelines. It allows you to create visually appealing and responsive user interfaces quickly.

How Do I Get Started with Material-UI in My React Application?

To get started, you can install Material-UI using npm or yarn. Then, you can import and use Material-UI components in your React application.

How Do I Customize the Appearance of Material-UI Components to Match My App’s Design?

Material-UI provides extensive theming support. You can create a custom theme using the createTheme function and override theme variables to match your app’s design. For newer versions, consider using the sx prop or the styled API for more advanced styling options.

Can I Use Material-UI Components in Conjunction with My Own CSS Styles?

Yes, you can integrate Material-UI components with your custom CSS styles. Material-UI components allow you to pass className and style props, so you can apply your own styling alongside Material-UI’s styling.

Can I Use Multiple React UI Component Libraries in the Same Project?

Yes, you can use multiple React component libraries within the same project. However, it’s important to be mindful of potential styling conflicts, differences in design principles, and increased bundle size.

What Are the Main Differences Between React-Bootstrap and Reactstrap?

Both React-Bootstrap and Reactstrap offer components based on Bootstrap. React-Bootstrap is a more mature library with a larger community where as Reactstrap is a bit more lightweight and flexible.

Can I Customize Themes in React UI Component Libraries?

Yes, most React UI component libraries allow for some level of theme customization. For example, libraries like MUI, Ant Design, Mantine, Chakra UI, Radix Primitives, and Shadcn offer extensive theming capabilities and tools for customizing components.

The above is the detailed content of Best React UI Component Libraries. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!