If you’re building applications in 2024, you need to work fast. You can’t spend time building your UI components when plenty of React UI Component libraries are available freely for public use!

You must focus on delivering customer requirements faster to stay above your competitors.

These libraries include buttons, forms, menus, and modals. A UI component library can save you time and effort; you don’t have to build these components from scratch.

So, let’s look at the top 5 React UI component libraries in 2024. I’ll discuss the features and benefits of each library so you can decide which one is right for you.

1. MUI

Material-UI is an open-source React component library that implements Google’s Material Design. It’s a comprehensive collection of prebuilt UI components ready for use in production right out of the box.

Features:

• A comprehensive set of components: Material-UI includes many components, including buttons, menus, forms, tables, and more.
• Mobile-first approach: Material-UI is designed to be mobile-first, which means that the components will look great on any device, from smartphones to desktops.
• Customizable: Material-UI components can be easily customized to match your brand guidelines or app’s design.
• Accessible: Material-UI components are built with accessibility in mind, meaning they are usable by people with disabilities.
• Themed: Material-UI supports theming, so you can easily change the look and feel of your app.

You can build independent components if you wish to work with frameworks like MUI.

Doing so ensures that you bring high maintainability and customizability into your MUI configurations and ultimately let you build distributed design systems.

For example, consider this Bit Component that represents a customizable MUI Theme:

This component represents a function that creates a dark theme:

The code snippet above depicts a ready to consume dark theme for any application. All users have to do is install it via Bit, or a preferred package manager (such as an NPM Package) and start using it.

If you wish to customize this pre-built theme, all you have to do is pass in your custom configuration object as a parameter to the function darkTheme.

After you’ve configured the theme in Bit, you can view all the components that rely on it:

Based on the graph shown above, you can see all the components that use the darkTheme component, and as a result, know the places that might be impacted if you release a new version of darkTheme.

2. Headless UI

Headless UI is a React library offering completely unstyled, fully accessible UI components designed to integrate seamlessly with Tailwind CSS.

Unlike traditional CSS-in-JS libraries, Headless UI focuses on the behavior and accessibility of components, leaving the visual styling entirely up to you.

Features:

• Unstyled & Customizable: It provides the building blocks for your interfaces, letting you control every visual aspect with Tailwind CSS or your custom styles. This gives you maximum flexibility to match your brand and design direction.
• Highly Accessible: All components are built with accessibility in mind, ensuring your interface is usable by everyone regardless of limitations.
• Seamless Tailwind Integration: Headless UI works flawlessly with Tailwind CSS, allowing you to leverage its utility classes for rapid styling and responsive design.
• Composed with Primitive Elements: Each component is built using native HTML elements, resulting in clean, lightweight code with minimal overhead.
• Focus on State Management: Headless UI tracks component state (open/closed, selected/unselected, etc.) but leaves visual representation entirely to you.

Getting started with Headless UI is not as hard as it seems. You can use pre-built Bit components to bootstrap a Headless UI environment to start building your components with ease.

All you’ll need to do is:

1. Create a Tailwind Environment
2. Start building with Bit!

It’s as simple as the five commands shown below:

// first initialize a bit workspace

bit init

// fork the headless ui environment to create your components.

bit fork learnbit-react.headless-ui/envs/react-headless-ui --scope my-org.design 

// fork the tailwind configuration if you wish to customize it. if not, skip this!

bit fork learnbit-react.headless-ui/tailwind/configs/tailwind-config --scope my-org.design 

// install the dependencies in your workspace for Tailwind to work

bit install tailwindcss@^2.2.19 postcss@^8.3.6 --type peer 


// create your component with headless UI and get started

bit create react ui/tabs --scope my-org.design --env learnbit-react.headless-ui/envs/react-headless-ui

For a more comprehensive guide on customizing Headless UI, check this out on Bit Cloud.

3. StyleX#

StyleX is a JavaScript syntax and compiler for styling web apps by the team at Meta. It introduces the same benefits of a standard CSS-in-JS solution (and more) without the performance overhead.

Features:

• Scalable: Stylex minimizes the CSS footprint by using atomic CSS. This makes your CSS code far more easier to maintain than traditional CSS.
• Composable: You don’t have to worry about merging styles manually. Stylex can merge and compose arbitrary styles across component and file boundaries.
• Type-safe: It offers a type safe API for your components to use. This makes it easier to enable customizability of the styles from outside your component.

To use Stylex in your project, I’d recommend working with Bit. Bit and Stylex shares the same values. Bit is a build system that also aims for composability, maintainability and scale.

Bit maintains and builds components as independent building blocks that can be shared, reused, and even developed across projects. This makes the two a perfect match for building a component library.

All you have to do is add the Stylex environment as a component generator in your Bit workspace:

/** @filename: workspace.jsonc */

{
   // ...
   "teambit.generator/generator": {
      "envs": [
          "learnbit-react.stylex/envs/react-stylex"
      ]
   }
}

Next, you can build a component with Stylex:

bit create stylex my-theme

This will create a Theme component that you can customize for use across your projects.

For a more detailed explanation on using Stylex with Bit, look into this guide:

4. Chakra UI

Chakra UI is a component library for building accessible and stylish React applications. It provides a set of ready-made UI components like buttons, forms, inputs, menus, etc., which you can easily integrate into your projects.

Features:

• Easy to use and understand components: Chakra UI components are designed to be intuitive and straightforward, making them ideal for both beginners and experienced developers.
• Modular and flexible UI construction: Each component is self-contained and can be used independently, allowing you to build your UI in a modular and flexible way.
• Extensive customization options: You can modify almost any aspect of a Chakra UI component using props and custom themes to achieve your desired look and feel.
• Native dark mode support: Most Chakra UI components natively support dark mode, making it easy to implement a sleek and modern dark theme for your app.
• Built with performance in mind: Chakra UI uses techniques like code splitting to ensure your app loads quickly and remains responsive on all devices.

5. Ant Design

Ant Design is a robust and popular UI design language and component library primarily aimed at building web applications with React.

Features:

• Enterprise-focused: Ant Design thrives in building B2B user interfaces, prioritizing efficiency, usability, and data clarity.
• Highly Customizable: Customize every aspect of components — sizes, colors, layouts, behavior, and more — to match your specific needs and brand guidelines.
• Extensive Range: Buttons, forms, tables, menus, navigation elements, data displays, feedback modules, and much more are readily available.
• Mobile-Friendly: Components adapt to various screen sizes, delivering a smooth experience across devices.
• Internationalization Support: Translate your interface into multiple languages, reaching a wider audience.

Wrapping Up

Selecting the appropriate React component library for your project isn’t just about following trends or picking the most popular one.

It’s about ensuring that the library aligns with your project’s specific requirements, design goals, and technical constraints.

Your choice can significantly impact the speed of development, ease of maintenance, and the overall user experience.

Create proof of concepts with each library to compare its features in greater depth before you select a library for your next React project.

I hope you find this article helpful.

Thank you for reading.

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