Best UI Frameworks for React.js

RaftLabs
6 min readOct 9, 2021

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React (also known as React.js or ReactJS) is a free and open-source JavaScript library for building user interfaces or UI components. It is maintained by Facebook and a community of individual developers and companies. React is a prevalent Front end framework with over 172k stars on GitHub. There is a growing range of support libraries that helps us customize our UI components efficiently.

Here we will look at some of the best React UI Frameworks that you can adopt in your project.

The comparison made here is based on user reviews from the following trusted sources:

  • GitHub
  • npm.js
  • StackShare
  • Stackoverflow

1) Ant Design — The world’s second most popular react UI framework

It is an enterprise-class UI design language with a set of high-quality React UI components. It is one of the best React UI library for enterprises. It offers many polished components that could be used to build an entire application. The documentation is extensive, with tons of examples, and stays up to date.

To find the examples of websites built on Ant Design, go here.

Developed By: Ant Design

Statistics:

  • GitHub Stars: 73.4k
  • 11,749 websites use ANT Design

Top companies using this:

Pros:

  • Internationalization support for dozens of languages,
  • Powerful theme customization, and Typescript support.
  • Ant design is supported by modern browsers and Internet Explorer 11.
  • Enterprise look and feel.
  • High quality icons.

More info

2) Material UI React UI components for faster and easier web development.

Material-UI is the most popular React UI framework that provides Google Material Design out of the box. Material design takes inspiration from the physical world and textures while keeping the actual UI elements to a minimum.

See the full showcase of public apps using Material UI here.

Developed By: Hai Nguyen

Statistics:

  • GitHub Stars: 70k
  • 193,907 websites use Material-UI

Top companies using this:

Pros:

  • Automatic color changes.
  • Switch between RTL and Non-RTL
  • Integration with Design Kits like Figma, Sketch and Adobe XD.
  • A wide range of helpful components are available, like app bars, auto complete, badges, buttons, cards, dialog boxes, icons, menus, sliders and more.
  • Material-UI also offers React themes and templates, so you can have a custom color theme for your app.

More info

3) React Bootstrap — The most popular front-end UI framework rebuilt for React.

React-Bootstrap replaces the Bootstrap JavaScript. Each component has been built from scratch as a true React component, without unneeded dependencies like jQuery. React Bootstrap is one of the oldest React UI libraries and has grown steadily with React itself. While React-Bootstrap doesn’t offer any official support, there is a massive, active community and plenty of resources supporting Bootstrap.

Developed By: Mark Otto, Jacob Thornton

Statistics:

  • GitHub Stars: 19.7k

Top companies using this:

Pros:

  • Bootstrap’s grid system allows fully responsive series of containers, rows, and columns for your layout.
  • Choose between dozens of components, including badges, carousels, toasts, and jumbotrons.
  • The React component model gives us more control over form and function of each component.

More info

4) Semantic UI React — The official plugin for Semantic UI

Semantic UI React is the official plugin for Semantic UI. The library boasts a collection of over fifty components, including segments, progress bars, transitions, pagination, and more. However, despite all of its unique features, if you do not have hands-on experience in JavaScript, you may find the library a bit complex.

Developed By: Jack Lukic

Statistics:

  • GitHub Stars: 12.4k

Top companies using this:

Pros:

  • Impressive customization and theming capabilities.
  • Zero traces of any jQuery code, simplifying the application development.
  • Wide collection of over 50 UI components for developers.
  • Complete SUI component definition support.
  • Simple declarative component APIs vs brittle HTML markup.

More info

5) Chakra UI — Simple, Modular & Accessible React UI Components for your React Applications

Chakra UI provides a set of accessible, reusable, and composable React UI components that make it easy to create websites and apps. Chakra UI components are built on top of a React UI Primitive for endless composability. The community of Chakra UI is very active. You will get all the help required whenever you feel stuck.

Developed By: Segun Adebayo

Statistics:

  • GitHub Stars: 19.6k

Top companies using this:

Pros:

  • Chakra UI contains a set of layout components like Box and Stack that make it easy to style your components by passing props.
  • Most components in Chakra UI are dark mode compatible.
  • Chakra UI components follows the WAI-ARIA guidelines specifications.
  • You can use the same react component as much as you want and customize it for further use.
  • Chakra UI library provides you modular react UI components that help in writing clean and optimal code.
  • This library does not require any heavy set up to implement and is simple and easy to use.

More info

6) Blueprint — A React-based UI toolkit for the web

Blueprint is a newly open-sourced design system implemented as a collection of composable React components and optimized for desktop applications. This is not a mobile-first UI toolkit.

Developed By: Palantir

Statistics:

  • GitHub Stars: 18k

Top companies using this:

Pros:

  • The React UI libraries has over forty components optimized in particular for complex data-dense interfaces for desktop applications.
  • Contains many useful components like breadcrumbs, buttons, callouts, cards, dividers, navbars, tabs, tags, and much more.
  • The library supports Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE 11, and Microsoft Edge.

More info

7) Grommet — Focus on the essential experience

Grommet is a react-based framework that provides accessibility, modularity, responsiveness, and theming in a tidy package. Grommet is a component library designed for responsive, accessible, and mobile-first web projects. It even has a list of SVG icons.

Developed By: Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Statistics:

  • GitHub Stars: 7.4k

Top companies using this:

Pros:

  • It embraces atomic design methods and allows for keyboard navigation, screen reader tags, and more.
  • Powerful theming tools which lets you tailor the component library to align with your color, type, and layout needs. You can even control component interaction.
  • Tailor composite components.
  • Flexible layouts.

More info

8) Evergreen — React UI Framework by Segment

Evergreen contains a set of polished React UI components that work out of the box. It features a UI design language for enterprise-grade web applications.

Developed By: Segment

Statistics:

  • GitHub Stars: 10.9k

Top companies using this:

  • Dashboard, Stack

Pros:

  • Evergreen contains a set of polished React UI components that work out of the box.
  • Evergreen features a UI design language for enterprise-grade web applications.
  • Evergreen has over 30 components which include buttons, filepickers, select menus, spinners, side sheets, tables, and more.
  • They offer a figma library, and they are working on patterns for handling “Error Messages” and “Table Layouts”.

More info

9) Fluent UI — Microsoft UI Kit for Web, Mobile & Desktop App Development.

Fluent UI web represents a collection of utilities, React components, and web components for building web applications. It has Web Components and native libraries for iOS, macOS, Android, and Windows.

Developed By: Microsoft

Statistics:

  • GitHub Stars: 11.8k
  • 97 websites use Fluent UI
  • Weekly Downloads on NPM: 53,498

Top companies using this:

Pros:

  • It has components for building forms and lists but also offers very specific ones like a PeoplePicker for example.
  • Good default styling capabilities without any code.
  • Good flexibility and ability to customize the look and functionality of the components.

More info

10) Rebass — React primitive UI components built with styled-system.

Rebass is one of the best grid libraries that provides UI components, leaving the developer to focus only on page development. Rebass offers documentation on recipes for common use cases like grids, navbar, and image cards.

Developed By: Brent Jackson

Statistics:

  • GitHub Stars: 7.4k
  • Weekly Downloads on NPM: 65,779

Top companies using this:

Pros:

  • First-class support for theming & full compatibility with Theme UI.
  • Quick, mobile-first responsive styles with array-based syntax.
  • Flexbox layout with the Box and Flex components.
  • Minimal footprint at about 4KB.
  • Best-in-class developer ergonomics with Styled System props.

More info

Originally posted at raftlabs.co

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RaftLabs

Building lovable software products for startups, agencies and enterprises in SaaS, media and marketing tech. https://www.raftlabs.com