UI component libraries are like the building blocks for your website's user interface, bringing pre-built elements and components to the table. They're here to make your life easier, offering a consistent look and feel for those eye-catching, unified applications. The world of UI libraries is vast and varied, especially for frameworks like React. From Material-UI, with its Google Material Design charm, to the modular wonders of Chakra UI, and the stylish prowess of Styled Components, the choices are endless. And let's not forget the all-rounders like Bootstrap and Tailwind CSS that play well with almost any framework!
So, how do you navigate this sea of options and pick the one that fits your project like a glove? Our frontend expert Katerina helps you to navigate the React UI libraries and some styling aces, breaking down their ideal use cases. Let's get started!
Choosing the Right React UI Component Library for Your Project
UI (User Interface) component libraries are collections of pre-built UI elements and components that can be used to build user interfaces for your websites. UI libraries offer a consistent look and feel, making it easier to build visually unified applications.
Today, there are numerous UI libraries tailored for various frameworks, making it challenging to determine the best fit for your upcoming project.
Let’s explore some of the React UI libraries and general styling UI tools and assess their ideal use cases.
Categorization of UI Libraries by Frameworks
UI Libraries and tools for React framework:
- Material-UI: Based on Google's Material Design.
- Chakra UI: A modular and accessible component library.
- Styled Components: A library that utilizes tagged template literals to style your components.
Material-UI and Chakra UI libraries are designed to accelerate development speed by offering pre-built components, promoting a uniform design, ensuring consistency, and frequently integrating best practices.
UI Library and tools that can be used with any framework:
- Bootstrap: The most popular HTML, CSS, and JS library for building responsive, mobile-first projects on the web.
- Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework that can be used with various JavaScript frameworks or standalone.
- Daisy UI: A plugin for Tailwind CSS, a utility-first CSS framework.
- Tailwind UI: A collection of professionally designed, pre-built, fully responsive HTML snippets you can drop into your Tailwind projects.
- Headless UI: A collection of unstyled, fully accessible UI components.
Categorization of UI Libraries Based on Goals
We can further classify UI libraries and tools based on the specific tasks they excel at. It’s crucial to identify and comprehend if the chosen tools suit our goals in the project.
Thus, when selecting UI tools for a project, it's essential to address the following questions:
Why have we chosen this particular tool? What issues should that tool resolve efficiently? And what are the potential limitations?
Within this classification, Sass and TailwindCSS serve as powerful additions to CSS; Bootstrap, TailwindUI, and DaisyUI function as styling systems; HeadlessUI, Radix, and React Aria are categorized as Behavior Libraries. MUI stands as a dedicated UI Component Library, whereas Chakra UI embodies a hybrid type.
Style Systems
Style Systems, such as Bootstrap, are comprehensive frameworks that provide a set of pre-designed components and utility classes for building web interfaces.They are all-encompassing toolkits designed to help in the rapid development of web interfaces, with a focus on both aesthetics and functionality.
Bootstrap, in particular, is one of the most popular style systems and comes with the following features:
- Responsive Grid System
- Utility Classes: Bootstrap provides utility classes for spacing, sizing, positioning, and more, allowing developers to make quick style adjustments without writing custom CSS.
- Customization Options: While Bootstrap comes with default styling, it can be customized to match specific design requirements, whether by overriding styles or using its Sass variables.
Tailwind UI is a component library built on top of Tailwind CSS, a utility-first CSS framework.
Tailwind UI offers several advantages, including:
- Utility-First Approach: Tailwind UI benefits from Tailwind CSS's utility-first approach, allowing for rapid prototyping and design flexibility
- Responsive Design: Tailwind UI makes it easy to create responsive designs with its mobile-first approach and utility classes that adjust for different screen sizes.
- Component-Based: It provides a set of pre-designed components that can be used as-is or customized, saving development time and ensuring design consistency.
- Customization: Tailwind UI components are built with Tailwind CSS, meaning they inherit its high degree of customization. You can modify the design to fit your brand's look and feel seamlessly.
But unlike Tailwind CSS, which is free, Tailwind UI is a paid product. This might be a barrier for some developers or small teams.
Behaviour Libraries
Behavior Libraries are an essential part of the modern web development ecosystem, providing the underlying logic and best practices to ensure that UI components are not only functional but also accessible and user-friendly.
Behavior Libraries are collections of components or utilities that focus primarily on the functionality and accessibility aspects of UI elements, rather than their styling. These libraries help manage the state, interactions, and behavior of components in a user interface, ensuring they work as intended across different devices and assistive technologies. They're crucial for creating accessible and user-friendly applications.
Examples of Behavior Libraries include:
- Headless UI: Provides unstyled, fully accessible UI components designed to integrate with Tailwind CSS.
- React Aria: Offers a library of React Hooks that manage state and ARIA attributes for common UI patterns.
MUI vs Chakra UI
In our projects we have the option to either build our own UI libraries or use existing ones and customize them to fit the needs. Our aim is to strike a balance, ensuring both design consistency and accessibility are at the forefront of our development process.
Both MUI and Chakra UI are popular React component libraries. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Here's a comparison of their pros and cons:
CHAKRA UI
Pros:
- Written in TS
- Highly customizable
- “Tailwind” feeling
- Accessibility is a priority
- Supports responsive styles out of the box
- Ease of use
- It's relatively lightweight compared to MUI
- Performance is better than MUI.
Cons:
- Smaller community with few contributors.
- Fewer components. Lack of Autocomplete, Date range picker components.
- Less mature than MUI.
MUI
Pros:
- Offers a wide range of components
- Follows Google's Material Design guidelines
- A strong emphasis on accessibility
- More contributors
Cons:
- Generate a lot of unnecessary markup
- MUI can potentially impact the overall bundle size leading to negative performance impact
- Additional efforts to customize and override the styles
- The Material Design is quite opinionated and might not fit all needs.
Performance stands out as the decisive factor in favor of Chakra UI.
Below are examples showcasing a basic input form, along with the corresponding HTML code generated by MUI and Chakra UI, respectively.
Not only performance is improved, but the customization is also much easier when using Chakra UI components.
Check out the examples below. A simple form with an input field generates significantly less HTML when using Chakra UI compared to the equivalent example that uses MUI.
CHAKRA
<FormControl>
<FormLabel>Email address</FormLabel>
<Input type='email' />
<FormHelperText>We'll never share your email.</FormHelperText>
</FormControl>
And it generates the following HTML markup:
MUI
For a text input in MUI v5, the HTML might look like this:
As we can see from the examples, MUI might include more wrapper elements and classes, which can make the HTML look more complex. Chakra UI's approach is more minimalistic. Based on this comparison, we’d recommend between two libraries to choose Chakra UI if you prioritize ease of use, customization, and performance.
Ultimately, the decision should be based on the specific requirements and constraints of your project. But always consider the limitations and keep scalability and performance issues in mind.
Custom UI Libraries built with TailwindCSS or with Styled Components vs. Chakra UI
As we’ve just checked the advantages and disadvantages of the Chakra UI library, let’s delve into the comparison between using this library in the project against creating a custom UI library using Tailwind CSS or Styled Components.
TailwindCSS is a utility-first CSS framework that provides low-level utility classes that you should apply directly to elements in your markup rather than inventing custom classes. The tool comes with these predefined classes instead of components as the building blocks of UI design. Though TailwindCSS requires the CSS code writing and knowledge of CSS within your team, it makes the code writing process easier and faster with its given classes and ways to extend them. In addition to that, your code quality will improve as TailwindCSS eliminates the need for cumbersome custom CSS and provides a clear class naming convention.
By using TailwindCSS, you are not limited by any restrictions, for example by the amount of prebuilt components and oppressive design. Instead, you can control your design system and extend it as the project grows. TailwindCSS opens doors to endless customization and extension opportunities, enabling the creation of scalable and adaptable solutions.
A potential drawback may arise from the need for Tailwind CSS syntax knowledge to ensure long-term maintenance of your project.
A good alternative to TailwindCSS for styling components is the use of the StyledComponents library, which offers a different approach to managing styles in your application.
Below are two examples illustrating the Boxes created using StyledComponents and TailwindCSS, respectively.
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Styled Components is a library for React that allows you to use component-level styles written with a mixture of JavaScript and CSS.
Like Tailwind CSS, Styled Components enables the creation of an own design system having complete control over it. However, it also involves CSS coding and requires substantial CSS expertise from developers. In contrast to TailwindCSS, where you can leverage pre-existing classes and minimize CSS code, you should write your own specific CSS for each component in Styled Components.
Research indicates that Tailwind CSS may offer slightly better performance, particularly on mobile devices, compared to Styled Components. Nonetheless, the performance difference is marginal, and both are effective for styling components.
As discussed earlier, Chakra UI comes with the minimal need for CSS coding. However, it has limitations in terms of customization, often requiring developers to adhere to Chakra's predefined methods and styles, and stick to choosing existing pre-built components. Chakra UI is ideally suited for projects with simpler designs and tight development timelines, especially when the team lacks extensive CSS expertise.
Despite Chakra UI strong points such as speed of development with readily available components, it's important for developers to avoid importing an entire library for just a handful of components, as this can lead to unnecessary bloat in the application's size.
In comparison to Tailwind CSS and Styled Components, Chakra UI offers a more out-of-the-box solution with less coding overhead, but at the cost of reduced flexibility and customization potential. Tailwind CSS and Styled Components, on the other hand, provide more control over the styling process, catering to more complex design requirements but requiring deeper CSS knowledge and more development effort.
Conclusion
Prioritize Tailoring Over Convenience for Complex Projects
For sophisticated, large-scale projects, prioritize custom architecture and component creation. Utilize your unique design elements to avoid constraining your UI with limitations inherent in pre-built libraries. This approach ensures your UI doesn't get bottlenecked by the constraints of ready-made solutions.
TailwindCSS for Custom, Detailed Designs
TailwindCSS is highly recommended for projects that demand extensive customization. It's ideal when you need a plethora of utility classes for creating highly tailored designs, allowing for greater control within your markup with minimal reliance on custom CSS.
Styled Components for Dynamic, Themeable UIs
When your application requires dynamic, easily themeable styles at the component level, consider Styled Components. This approach is particularly effective for applications where the UI needs to adapt or change based on different themes or user preferences.
Chakra UI for Quick, Simple React Projects
For smaller-scale projects or when time constraints are a significant factor, Chakra UI is an excellent choice. It's especially suitable for projects that can benefit from a range of pre-designed components, accelerating development. Chakra UI is particularly advantageous for React developers seeking rapid development without the necessity to craft a custom UI from the ground up.
In summary, your choice of CSS tool or framework should align with your project's complexity, design requirements, and time constraints. Tailor your approach to maximize efficiency, maintain control over your UI/UX, and ensure that your final product aligns with your specific needs and goals.
