Building impressive websites in today's development world is easier than ever, thanks to the wealth of tools at our fingertips. But one framework stands out from the pack - React.

React is currently one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks, so many component UI libraries are built on top of it. These UI libraries provide pre-built and customizable components that reduce the development process, enhance code reusability, and deliver polished user experiences.

In this article, we will look at the benefits of using component libraries, things to consider before choosing a component library, and the top React UI libraries available to us.

What Are React UI Component Libraries?

React UI component libraries are collections of ready-to-use or pre-coded user interface elements that help accelerate software development. These pre-designed elements range from buttons, modals, and cards to complex components like data tables and charts.

React UI component libraries are created to simplify the creation of user interfaces by providing developers with building blocks and elements that follow best practices in design and accessibility.

The Benefits of Using a React UI Component Library

Below are a few of the benefits of using a React UI component library:

Speed: Using a React UI component library simplifies and speeds up the process of implementing design features and functionalities, instead of writing code for each one from scratch.

Easy to use: CSS takes time to learn, and designing complex user interfaces can be challenging. With React UI libraries, even beginners can import and use the available elements without focusing too much on the CSS designs.

Consistency: React UI libraries ensure a consistent look and feel across your application, as they are designed with a cohesive style guide.

Productivity: React UI libraries significantly accelerate development time by reducing the need to build components from scratch, allowing developers to focus on more complex functionality.

Customization: Although these libraries offer ready-to-use components, they are often highly customizable to fit your project's specific requirements.

Community Support: Popular libraries benefit from large communities, which means continuous development, bug fixes, and plenty of documentation. React UI libraries often have large communities and maintainers.

Accessibility: Many UI libraries prioritize accessibility, making it easier to create applications that are usable by everyone.

Top React UI Component Libraries

Material UI

Material UI is an open-source developed by MUI, it's a react component library that implements Google’s Material Design. It includes a prebuilt collection of out-of-the-box components that are ready to use in production.

It has over 89.2k GitHub stars and over 3milion weekly downloads on NPM.

KEY FEATURES

• Typography: Material UI follows its typography guidelines to ensure all text elements have consistent text styling.
• Icons: Material UI provides a collection of icons that can be used in your application. The icons can be imported from the @mui/icons-material package.
• Form controls: Material UI provides a range of form components like text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, and select menus, to make creating a user-friendly form easy and accessible.
• Themes: Material UI offers theme toggling customization with support for dark and light modes. You can customize the theme to your preferred choice using the ThemeProvider component.

BENEFITS

• Aesthetics: Material UI has modern, beautiful designs to select from. They follow their very intuitive design guidelines to make sure the design aesthetics are top-notch.
• Customization: Material UI offers customization options that allow developers to easily tailor components and themes to their preferred designs.
• Accessibility: Material UI prioritizes accessibility. The library is designed to be accessible by default, making it easier to create usable applications for everyone.
• Responsive Design: Material UI components are responsive to ensure your application works well on different screen sizes and devices.
• Developer-Friendly: The documentation is well-written so developers can easily understand and use the library. The components are also easy to import and implement.

Chakra UI

This is another fast-growing, popular, and accessible React UI library. Chakra UI is a simple, modular library that gives you the building blocks to build your React applications.

Chakra UI has over 34.6k stars on GitHub and 480k weekly downloads on NPM

KEY FEATURES

• Style Props: Chakra UI makes use of style props to style components. See below:

In the above code snippet, m represents the margin, while bg represents the background color.

• Icons: Chakra UI provides a collection of icons from the @chakra-ui/icons package that can be used in your application.
• Form controls: Chakra UI also provides components like Textarea, Input, and Checkbox that have built-in validations and form controls like isDisabled, isInvalid, and so on.
• Notification: Chakra UI has notification components like Toast and Alert that display state notification messages to users.

BENEFITS

• Simplicity: The Chakra UI is simple to use and understand, reducing the learning curve and allowing developers to focus on development.
• Accessibility: Chakra UI is built with accessibility in mind.
• Theme: Chakra UI is dark mode compatible by default. You can also customize the theme color to your preferred color mode.
• Customization: All component styles can be overridden or extended via style props. You can easily customize the component, including things like colors and spacing.
• Documentation: The documentation is comprehensive and well-written, with usage guidelines and examples.
• Developer Community: It has an active and growing community of developers. Aside from the core team, over a hundred developers are actively contributing to the project, so you’re sure to see resources and improvements in the library.

Ant Design

Ant Design is a well-documented React UI library with high-quality React components. It is a popular React library and one of the most used libraries, with over 87k stars on GitHub and more than 1 million weekly downloads on NPM. Ant Design is an excellent choice if you want to build enterprise-grade products.

KEY FEATURES

• Internationalization Support: Ant Design supports dozens of languages and has built-in internationalization support for global users.
• Theme: Ant Design allows theme customization, so you can integrate your light and dark theme and customize your preferred theme mode.
• Icons: Ant Design offers a variety of icons from the @ant-design/icons package.
• Navigation Menus: The library includes navigation menus like the menus, sidebars, etc.
• Data Visualization: Ant Design provides data visualization components like Charts and Graphs. This can be accessed from the @ant-design/charts package.
• Date Pickers and Calendar: It also provides date pickers, time pickers, and calendars that can be customized to your choice.
• Popovers and Tooltips: It offers popups and tooltips that show context-sensitive information.

BENEFITS

• Customization: It allows theming and customization and gives you customization control over typography, style, and colors to fit your preferred design.
• Accessibility: It follows accessibility best practices, allowing you to build for all types of users.
• Form Controls: It has a robust form validation that helps to simplify your form validation logic.
• Community Support: The library has a large and active community of developers who are maintaining, contributing, and improving the library. There are also articles to help you as you build.
• Enterprise-Grade: It is designed and built with enterprise applications in mind and provides a well-designed and professional look for your enterprise or business applications.

React BootStrap

React BootStrap is also one of the most popular React UI libraries. Built on top of the popular Bootstrap framework, this library brings Bootstrap's components to React as it aims to replace Bootstrap JavaScript.

React BootStrap has over 22k stars on GitHub and over 2million weekly downloads on NPM

KEY FEATURES

• Bootstrap Components: React BootsStrap offers a wide range of Bootstrap components that include buttons, forms, navigation, modals, and so on.
• Theme: React BootStrap provides theme support through Bootstrap SASS variables.
• Accessibility: Each component is built with accessibility in mind and follows the accessibility standards.
• Forms: React BootStrap provides form components that support form validations.
• React Hooks Support: React BootStrap components are compatible with React hooks. This means the state can be passed within the React BootStrap component as props, making managing your states and effects easier.

BENEFITS

• Responsive Design: React BootStrap grid system ensures your web apps look and work well on various screen sizes and devices. It is built with Flexbox and is fully responsive.
• Customization: React BootStrap allows developers to customize and extend components to match their applications’ designs.
• Community Support: React BootStrap has elaborate documentation that explains how to use the library. Due to the large active community, there are tutorials and resources online that will also guide you on how to work with the library.

PrimeReact

PrimeReact is a rich set of open-source UI components for React designed for the PrimeNG ecosystem. It is a design-agnostic React UI library with over 96k weekly NPM downloads and 4.6k GitHub stars.

This is one of my favorites because of the list of features that it possesses and offers out-of-the-box. You can do a lot with the PrimeReact library without installing extra packages.

KEY FEATURES

• Data Tables: PrimeReact offers data table components with features like sorting, filtering, and pagination.
• Form Inputs: Forms in PrimeReact include checkboxes, radio buttons, and date pickers, all with pre-built validation support.
• Charts: PrimeReact includes chart components like bar charts, line, and pie charts, which are easily customizable.
• Navigation Menus: Menus like breadcrumbs and tab menus are the different types of navigation menus that PrimeReact supports.
• Rich Text Editor: PrimeReact provides a rich text editor to integrate into your content and text formatting application.
• Lazy loading: Components in PrimeReact can be lazy-loaded to improve or optimize your application’s performance.
• Widgets: Sliders, progress bars, and badges are available in the PrimeReact library.
• Icons: PrimeReact has a package called PrimeIcons containing its icons.
• Hooks: PrimeReact supports hooks that can be imported and used from the primereact/hooks package.
• Overlay: PrimeReact provides overlay tooltips and popup components that allow you to show context-sensitive information and modal messages.

BENEFITS

• Components: PrimeReact provides a comprehensive collection of UI components, from basic components like input fields and buttons to complex components like charts and media carousels.
• Templates: PrimeReact offers customizable templates to use and build your projects. In addition, they also offer dozens of intuitive icons that you can integrate into your application.
• Theme: PrimeReact allows developers to customize the appearance and behavior of components. It also ships various themes that you can choose from.
• Responsive: PrimeReact is designed to be responsive out-of-the-box, making your application look good on various screen sizes.
• Accessibility: PrimeReact prioritizes accessibility and follows the accessibility standards to give you components you can use to build apps for every user.

Next UI

Next UI is a fully-featured React UI library with excellent performance, perfect for your web applications. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced developer, you can easily build your application with the library.

Next UI is also based on Tailwind Variants and is written in TypeScript. It has over 16k stars on GitHub and over 44k weekly downloads on NPM

KEY FEATURES

• Theme: Next UI has a well-scaled default dark theme to apply to your application. You can define themes, color schemes, and styles according to your preferred project.
• Lazy Loading: Many Next UI components support lazy loading, which can help improve your app’s performance by loading components and assets only when needed.
• Internationalization Support: Next UI includes internationalization support, making creating multilingual applications for a global user base easier.
• Form Validation: Form components in Next UI come with built-in form validations, helping to simplify the process of handling form validation logic.
• Animations and Transition: Next UI components often include animations and transition support for smooth and clean UI interactions. It uses Framer Motion to animate some components due to the complexity of the animations.

BENEFITS

• Accessibility: This is a top priority with Next UI. Next UI components are built on top of React Aria and follow WAI-ARIA guidelines to ensure exceptional accessibility support.
• Customization: Next UI allows easy customization for themes, typography, and styles. The flexibility allows for unique and beautiful UI designs.
• Developer Experience: Next UI is built with developers in mind, offering a very user-friendly and intuitive API. It is easy for beginner and advanced developers to grasp and use. The documentation also provides a thorough explanation with examples of using and configuring the library.
• Reusable Components: Next UI provides a comprehensive set of reusable UI components. These components can be easily integrated into your React application, reducing development time.
• Community: The community is active and growing. The library is actively maintained, bugs are fixed, and new features are regularly introduced and added.

Semantic UI React

Semantic UI is a popular React UI framework known for its clear and human-friendly HTML. Semantic UI React is the official React integration of the Semantic UI and has over 100 components that you can easily use in building your application.

It has over 13k stars on GitHub and over 260k weekly downloads on NPM

KEY FEATURES

• Auto Controlled State: The components in Semantic UI React that have states self-manage their states out-of-the-box, without wiring. This means you don’t need to write the state logic explicitly, as it is handled automatically.
• Shorthand props: Semantic UI React uses shorthand props to generate markups. For instance, icon props can accept string names, can be object props, or an <Icon /> instance.

• Augmentation: It makes use of augmentation. This means that a component can be rendered as another component using the as props.

BENEFITS

The features above are some of the major benefits of the Semantic UI React. Other benefits include;

• Theme: Semantic UI React offers theme support and allows you to customize the layout, and styles to your feel.
• Community Support: Semantic UI React has an active community, so you will always find tutorials, third-party tensions, bug fixes, and answers to your questions and challenges.
• Developer Experience: Semantic UI React is quite easy to use. The documentation is also easy to work around and locate the things you need.

Grommet

Grommet is a responsive library focused on scalability and accessible design. It is an all-around React UI library to build web-accessible and responsive applications.

Grommet is known for its focus on usability, theming, and extensive intuitive components. It is a part design system and part framework. It has over 8k GitHub stars and over 24k weekly downloads on NPM

KEY FEATURES

• Theming: Grommet’s theming is one of its best features. It has built-in themes that you can choose from, allowing you to customize it with your preferred color scheme.
• Accessibility: Accessibility is also a top priority, and it follows the web accessibility standard for its components. This allows you to build applications for all users.
• Form Validation: The text inputs come with validation features, reducing the task of writing your validation logic.
• Animation and Transition: Grommet supports animation and transitions, allowing you to create smooth and user-interactive user interfaces.

BENEFITS

• Responsiveness: Grommet is built with responsive design in mind so your application works well on multiple screen sizes. It is a mobile-first UI library that approaches design to ensure that it is responsive on mobile devices.
• Accessibility: This is a feature and benefit as it benefits both the developer and the global user base.
• Developer Experience: The developer's experience is good as it is easy to use and understand. The documentation is also not complete or difficult to walk through.
• Community Support: Grommet has an active community, and the documentation is updated as new features are added/introduced.

Onsen UI

Onsen UI is an open-source React UI library that is also mobile-focused. It's excellent for building hybrid and mobile web applications. They also have IOS and Android material design support.

Onsen UI has a native look and feel, as its components are specifically designed for mobile applications. It has over 8k GitHub stars and over 24k weekly downloads

KEY FEATURES

• Customization: You can style components to your app’s design and branding.
• Gesture Support: Onsen UI provides built-in gesture support to make your application feel like a mobile application. Touch gestures like swiping, tapping, and dragging are supported by default. It detects these gestures using a minified version of Hammer.js.
• UI Components: It offers many mobile-friendly components such as carousels, dialogs, navigation drawers, etc.

BENEFITS

• Native Experience: Onsen UI offers a set of UI components that mimic the native mobile application designs and feels, providing you with the same user experience as a mobile application.
• Performance: Onsen UI is optimized for performance to ensure a smooth and animated transition for a better user experience.
• Cross-Platform Compatibility: Onsen UI allows you to build mobile applications that work for both IOS and Android platforms using a single codebase.
• Theme: The Onsen UI library supports and has built-in themes that you can choose from for your application. You can also customize the theme to your project’s brand.

Tailwind UI

Tailwind UI is an official UI library by the creators of Tailwind CSS. It provides pre-built, customizable, and production-ready UI components for Tailwind CSS.
Tailwind UI has over 9k GitHub stars and is a paid library with monthly and yearly pricing options.

KEY FEATURES

• Pre-built components: Tailwind UI offers dozens of pre-designed, pre-built UI components like navigation bars, hero sections, cards, forms, and more.
• Designs for popular frameworks: Components come with React, Vue, and AlpineJS code examples, so you can easily integrate them.
• Customizable: All components are customizable with Tailwind CSS utility classes. Modify colors, spacing, fonts, etc.
• Growing library: New components are continuously added based on user feedback and requests.
• Premium support: Paid plans include one-on-one email support from the Tailwind UI team.

BENEFITS

• Saves development time: The ready-made components help you build UIs faster vs. coding from scratch.
• Beautiful designs: Components follow best practices for aesthetics, usability, and accessibility.
• Easy to customize: Tailwind CSS classes allow extensive customization with minimal effort.
• Supports popular frameworks: Integrate components easily into React, Vue, and AlpineJS apps.
• Active development: The team regularly adds new components and improvements.
• Documentation: Clear instructions and examples for using and configuring components.

Core UI

Core UI is a customizable library for building responsive web applications. Core UI is an enterprise UI library that leads open-source admin dashboard templates. It has dozens of admin templates you can buy and download for your use.

Core UI also provides cross-browser compatibility. It has about 618 GitHub stars and over 47k weekly downloads

KEY FEATURES

• SASS Support: Core UI is built using SASS(Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets), which allows developers to write cleaner and more maintainable CSS code.
• Icons: Core UI includes icons that can be used in your application. You have to import the icons from the icon package called @coreui/icons
• Data Visualization: Since Core UI is an enterprise UI library, or in other words an admin dashboard library, it supports data visualization through Charts.
• Theme: Themes are supported in the library and can be easily customized too.
• Navigation: Core UI includes routing and navigation components for building multi-page web applications.

BENEFITS

• Customization: The Core UI library is highly customizable as developers can modify the appearance and behavior or the elements and components, including the templates.
• Responsive Design: Core UI is designed with responsiveness in mind. This ensures that your application works and functions well at different screen sizes.
• Community: The community of Core UI is active. Active communities mean that support is being provided, updates are being introduced, and bugs are being fixed to ensure that the library is maintained and improved.
• Documentation: Another benefit is the documentation. It is written comprehensively so developers can navigate easily and concepts and usage are explained effectively.

Blueprint UI

Blueprint UI is an open-source project by Palantir Technologies that offers a set of high-quality UI components. Blueprint UI is a React-based UI toolkit best used for building complex interfaces for desktop applications. Hence, if you want to build desktop applications, this library is the perfect fit.

With over 20k GitHub stars and over 193k weekly downloads on NPM, Blueprint UI is quite popular.

KEY FEATURES

• Icons: Blueprint UI has a library @blueprintjs/icons with over 500 vector icons in two sizes(16px and 20px) and two formats(SVG and fonts). These icons can be easily used in your React application.
• Accessibility: Blueprint provides accessible components out of the box and utilizes ARIA attributes and roles.
• Form Controls: The form elements are controlled and validated, too.
• Overlays: Blueprint also offers overlay components like the Toast, Tooltip, Alert, Popovers, and so on that allow developers to display context-sensitive information and error messages.
• DateTime: Blueprint also provides date components like date picker, range picker, and time picker that lets developers build time and date interactivity.
• Internationalization: Blueprint UI supports internationalization, making building applications for different regions and languages easy. Utilizing the class .bp5-rtl, languages like Hebrew and Arabic are written from right to left.

BENEFITS

• Developer-friendly: The documentation is easy to navigate through. Concepts and Tutorials are also properly explained with examples.
• Performance: The Blueprint library is designed to be performant.
• Customization: The library typography, color schemes, and styles can be customized
• Accessibility: Blueprint also prioritizes accessibility by adhering to the accessibility standards and guidelines.
• Theme: Blueprint UI provides two UI color themes: light and dark.

React Suite

React Suite is a set of high-quality React components that provide an excellent developer experience. It is a customizable React UI library that offers rich and extensible UI components.

It has over 7k+ GitHub stars and more than 59k+ weekly downloads on NPM

KEY FEATURES

• Hooks Support: React Suite has support for React hooks. Developers can use the hooks to manage states and effects.
• Date Visualization: The React Suite library provides chart components for data visualization.
• Form Components: React Suite offers form components such as text inputs with added validation logic.
• Theming: React Suite allows developers to create custom themes and apply predefined themes to align with their preferred choice.
• Routing Integration: React Suite integrates with routing libraries like React Router to simplify the navigation experience.

BENEFITS

• Customization: React Suite has flexibility that allows for styles and theme customizations.
• Accessibility: Just like other React UI libraries, React Suite prioritizes accessibility and provides features like the ARIA attributes
• Performance: It is optimized for performance so the user experience is smooth and components load fast.
• Community Support: React Suite has an active community of developers maintaining, updating, and introducing new features. Tutorials are also easily accessible.
• Consistent Design: The library consistently follows its design principles and guidelines.

Mantine

Mantine is a fully functional React UI library that has over 100 customizable components and 50 hooks that you can use to build your React web applications. It is also open-source and TypeScript supported. It has over 21k GitHub stars and over 250k weekly downloads.

KEY FEATURES

• Components: Mantime offers various UI components, from basic components like buttons and input fields to complete components like modals, notifications, etc.
• Theme: Mantim supports themes and allows developers to customize their preferred themes.
• Animations and Transitions: Mantime has built-in support for smooth animations and transitions for a better user experience.
• Hooks: Mantime UI has up to 50 hooks that help simplify tasks like form handling and animations.
• Icons: This library supports icon libraries like react-icons, font awesome, and radix icons.

BENEFITS

• Developer Experience: Mantime provides a good developer experience as the documentation is written well and arranged orderly for easy navigation. It is also easy to learn and use so that beginners can use it without hassle.
• Customization: Developers can customize the typography and themes and adjust stylings to their needs.
• Community Support: With a growing and active developer community, Mantime is well-maintained and updated.
• Accessibility: This is also a priority for Mantime. All components are built to be fully accessible so that developers can build applications for all types of users.

React-Admin

React-Admin is a React UI library that is perfect for B2B applications. Built on top of REST and GraphQL APIs, React-Admin is an open-source library that aims to provide the best experience for developers looking to build admin dashboards. It is currently being used by more than 10k companies across the globe. It has both free and enterprise-tier editions.

It has over 23k GitHub stars and 56k weekly downloads. I highly recommend this library if you want to build any admin dashboard as it offers virtually everything you need to build a highly responsive, and web-accessible admin application.

KEY FEATURES

• Data Visualization: React-Admin provides different chart types to allow the admin to visualize data and information.
• Authentication: React-Admin lets you secure your admin application with built-in authentication. It delegates the authentication logic to its authProvider object.
• Form Validation: react-Admin uses the react-hook-form library to validate input forms. You don't have to write validation logic as it handles it for you.
• Internationalization (i18n): React-Admin uses English as its default language. However, you can display your admin contents in other languages, using its translation features like the i18nProvider and a set of hooks: useTranslate and useLocaleState

BENEFITS

• Accessibility: React-Admin prioritizes accessibility. It uses the WAI-ARIA standard to make the components accessible. This includes keyboard navigation, arai-attributes, etc.
• Theming: React-Admin supports custom themes. You can easily customize the theme of your admin application to your preferred choice.
• Responsiveness: The library is built to be mobile-responsive by default so that your admin application looks neat and works well in different screen sizes.
• Developer Experience: The documentation is properly written and well-arranged to simplify navigating. It is easy to use and understand as every concept is well explained. Developers don't have to worry about the UI of their application and can focus on the business logic side.
• Community Support: The community support is also wonderful. There is active maintenance of the library, and articles and tutorials are available.

Summary

We have seen the benefits of using UI libraries and the top React UI libraries available when building our React applications. They are all good libraries that simplify our tasks and give users a great user experience. Hopefully, you'll find this list helpful! Let us know which React UI Component library you prefer the most in the comments below, and happy coding!