If you’re searching for the best React component libraries for your next project, you’ve come to the right place.
Note: This article was generated with the help of AI tools and may reference companies I'm affiliated with.
After spending more than 60 hours testing the leading React component libraries, I put together this deep-dive guide based on hands-on evaluation, reading through docs, trying out real-life use cases, and closely comparing crucial features.
With over five years of front-end development experience, including both solo and team projects, I’ve run into my fair share of UI library headaches. Some tools look great until you hit a wall in flexibility or get bogged down by code bloat and confusing APIs. In this guide, I’ve focused on the options that actually help you move fast, produce polished apps, and can grow with your requirements.
If you have a favorite library I missed, or want to share your own experience, send me a message!
How I Tested Each Library
To make sure I was comparing apples to apples, I used this process for every React component library:
- Setup & Onboarding: How quickly can I install and get started? (Including npm/yarn installation, config, and rendering the first component.)
- Core Functionality: I built out a sample UI with a button, form, modal, and navigation to see what’s included and how flexible it all feels.
- Ease of Use: Is the API clear and easy to pick up? Could I use it without constantly checking the docs? Does it fit React conventions?
- Speed & Stability: I looked at final bundle sizes, performance in the browser, any bugs or warnings, and whether everything worked smoothly in different browsers.
- Support & Documentation: I read through the docs, checked sample code, and explored community forums, GitHub, and chat channels for help resources.
- Customization & Theming: How easily can I change the style or theme? Is it easy to align with a unique brand? Did it work with CSS-in-JS and handle accessibility well?
- Overall Experience: I considered how it felt to work with daily, from quick prototyping to more complex, scalable projects.
🏆 My Overall Favorite - gluestack
Fresh, fast, universal, and truly developer-friendly.
Right out of the gate, gluestack impressed me. The setup was a breeze, the UI felt inviting, and I found myself productive within minutes, not hours. Some tools promise simplicity but hide complexity (or vice versa), while gluestack manages to be powerful and approachable at once.
The core idea is simple: gluestack gives you a complete React component library you can copy, adapt, and use across web and mobile without getting locked into a specific ecosystem. You get universal code reuse across React, Next.js, and React Native, with solid accessibility and no-frills integration.
What stood out to me
- Components are fully open, customizable, and ready to use right away.
- One codebase works across web, Next.js, and React Native.
- Style components however you like, including Tailwind CSS or NativeWind.
- Strong out-of-the-box performance and minimal runtime overhead.
- Accessible by default, making apps more inclusive.
- Community is active and helpful.
- Developer tools like the MCP Server automate a lot of tedious code generation.
A few downsides
- Some frequently requested components (like date or time pickers) are still in the works.
- You’ll need a bit of manual setup if you want custom starting styles or themes.
What about cost?
gluestack is totally open source and free. You get the full source code on GitHub, and there’s a solid open community, so you’ll never be locked out by paywalls.
🥈 MUI - Complete Material Design, but Can Be Overwhelming
A deep library for established teams, with a learning curve to match.
MUI (formerly Material-UI) delivers a gigantic set of React components, all styled with Google’s Material Design. If you’re working on a big, design-consistent app or need data grids and templates, MUI is worth a look. That said, onboarding can be challenging-MUI seems tailored for developers who already know the ins and outs, and the documentation sometimes feels like a reference manual.
What impressed me
- Huge library of prebuilt components for all sorts of needs.
- Stars at Material Design implementation.
- Customization and theming is powerful and deep.
- Big community, loads of examples.
What made it tougher
- Can be daunting to learn, especially if Material Design is new to you.
- Advanced features like the Data Grid come at a higher price.
- Documentation is thorough, but can be overwhelming instead of accessible.
- Getting support is often a slow process, and enterprise features are expensive.
- Customizing outside the Material Design "look" can be tricky.
How much does it cost?
- MUI Core: Free
- MUI X Pro: $15 per developer each month
- MUI X Premium: $49 per developer each month, or you can get a perpetual license
- No actual free trial for Pro or Premium, just live demos
🥉 Ant Design - Enterprise Strength, Steep Learning
A robust toolkit, but not always the most flexible or friendly.
Ant Design is popular with large teams and enterprise-level projects, thanks to its massive set of components and strong design system. Nearly every UI piece you might need is here, particularly if you’re building data-heavy dashboards. Still, there’s a catch: diving deep with Ant means dealing with a lot of complexity, Less-based theming, and a bigger bundle size than some alternatives.
What I found valuable
- Offers a massive suite of components, perfect for data-rich interfaces.
- Consistent design language throughout.
- Supports internationalization and is actively updated.
- Works with React, Vue, and Angular, which is rare.
- Good documentation and community support.
What gave me pause
- Takes considerable time to understand and customize.
- Can cause large bundle sizes that drag down app speed.
- Less-based styling can be a pain point for custom themes.
- Some of their help docs are more accessible to Chinese speakers.
- Custom tweaks often mean wrestling with built-in design opinions.
- Can be sluggish on massive dashboards or complex screens.
Pricing
The core library is free and open source.
Chakra UI - Fast Start for Accessible React Apps
Modern and semantic, though not always as easy or flexible as I expected.
Chakra UI focuses on accessibility and ease of use. Its highly customizable, props-based styling is a joy for making UI semantically correct and visually appealing. However, as projects get bigger or more custom, Chakra’s unique way of theming and the additional dependencies (like emotion.js) can slow things down or limit cross-platform potential.
Things I appreciated
- Strong accessibility out of the box.
- Attractive, high-quality default components.
- Solid theming options for brand consistency.
- Updates come regularly, and the open-source community is responsive.
Places for improvement
- Theming logic can feel confusing-defaults aren’t always easy to bypass.
- Learning “the Chakra way” means unlearning typical React UI habits.
- Some built-in components are harder to tweak for custom branding.
- Adds to bundle size and uses emotion.js, which could clash with other styling approaches.
- Support is often slow, and their paid tier doesn't offer a huge feature jump for the price.
What’s the cost?
- Free and open source for the core components.
- Chakra UI Pro: a one-off fee of $299 (personal) or $899 (team) gets you extra components and updates.
Semantic UI React - Classic UI Library, Feels Heavy Today
Solid and recognizable, but sometimes slow to customize.
Semantic UI React brings the familiar Semantic UI look into the React ecosystem. It’s packed with ready-to-use components, but underneath the surface, I found that customization required fighting with hard-to-override CSS. Things work out of the box, but modern styling and performance needs can be challenging.
Reasons to use it
- Large set of battle-tested, responsive components.
- You can swap out how components are rendered with the
asprop. - Leverages Semantic UI’s themes smoothly, and does not require preprocessors.
- Reliable for straightforward use cases.
Shortcomings I noticed
- Bundle size tends to balloon and slows down load times.
- Customizing styles usually means dealing directly with tough CSS overrides.
- Theming is much less flexible than with newer tools.
- Some components rigidly handle their own state, complicating integration.
- Design and behavior may feel a bit behind current trends.
Cost and availability
Semantic UI React is open source. There’s no paid pro version, but you might need to invest in your own integration and support.
Blueprint - Powerful for Data Apps, Not Mobile-Ready
TypeScript, deep features, built for desktop, but prepare for complexity.
Blueprint is all about desktop-focused enterprise interfaces-think analytics dashboards loaded with complex tables and charts. If you love TypeScript and crave modular, highly detailed components, Blueprint is a top choice. For anyone hoping for an easy learning curve or responsive, mobile-first UIs, it’s probably not the best fit.
Pros I discovered
- Excellent for laying out data-heavy, desktop-first interfaces.
- Comes with advanced tables, icon sets, and color tools.
- Highly customizable, perfect for fine-grained adjustments.
- Maintained by Palantir and open-source.
Areas that fell short
- Mobile responsiveness is not a strong point.
- Some parts, like Popover, can be buggy or confusing.
- Dark mode and theming can be time-consuming to implement.
- Docs expect you already know React; onboarding isn’t the easiest.
- You may run into performance blips with big datasets.
Pricing details
Blueprint is free and open source, but don’t expect paid support or extra commercial tools.
React Bootstrap - Familiar, Reliable, but Not Modern
Great for Bootstrap fans, but limited if you want control or innovation.
React Bootstrap aims to bring Bootstrap’s classic components into the React world. If you’ve already used Bootstrap and prefer to stick with tried-and-true patterns, it’s an easy transition. However, when it comes to customization, performance on bigger projects, or updating your design, you might hit a ceiling.
Highlights for me
- Large, well-known set of components.
- Smooth integration if you already work with Bootstrap.
- Good on accessibility in many cases.
- Maintained and open-source.
Cons I ran into
- Custom theming is limited and tricky to get just right.
- Slows down for large or complex apps.
- Docs sometimes lack depth or clear explanations.
- Accessibility isn’t always consistent across all components.
- Visual style is looking a bit old compared to newer UI kits.
Price point
React Bootstrap is fully open source.
Grommet - Strong Accessibility, Steep Learning
Great intentions, but can be tough if you’re new or want lots of components.
Grommet is focused on accessibility and flexible layouts, and hits W3C’s WCAG 2.1 standards hard. Theming and grid-based layouts are excellent, but I found the overall experience less streamlined than newer tools-especially when digging into advanced features or finding answers in the documentation.
Why you might like it
- Emphasizes accessibility right out of the box.
- Theming and customization work well, especially with Flexbox and CSS Grid.
- Responsive designs are easy.
- Active open-source core team.
What needs work
- Docs can be sparse and hard to navigate, especially for complex use cases.
- Offers fewer prebuilt components than many competitors.
- The UI style is a bit dated.
- Support and onboarding help are limited, which can slow progress for teams.
Fees
Grommet is open source and free for anyone. Paid support is available, but pricing isn’t clear or advertised.
Evergreen - Polished, Composable, but Demanding
Made for dashboards and enterprise apps, but not the easiest for beginners.
Evergreen, created by Segment, puts highly composable components front and center. Dashboards and enterprise apps look sleek right away, but flexibility means more to learn, and you might find yourself wishing for better onboarding or a bigger support system if you hit a snag.
Good stuff here
- Visually polished components fit for real enterprise projects.
- Highly composable, giving you lots of architectural freedom.
- Well-designed for common dashboard workflows.
Drawbacks I bumped into
- The community is smaller, so help is harder to find.
- Can feel heavy for basic or mobile-focused apps.
- Learning curve is steep if you haven’t used composable UI systems before.
- Sometimes requires more configuration than you’d expect.
Cost information
Evergreen is open source. For deep support or integrations, you may need to be a paying Segment customer; pricing isn’t listed.
Kendo UI - Full Toolbox, Tougher Workflow
Rich feature set, but tricky docs and higher cost.
Kendo UI’s toolkit is loaded: over 100 native React components, plus design tools like ThemeBuilder. In daily use, though, the sheer volume can feel overwhelming. Documentation sometimes expects you to know things already, and fine-tuning component appearance or performance is rarely straightforward.
Where it excels
- Broadest feature list around with advanced grids, charts, and more.
- Strong accessibility features built in.
- Large, engaged user community.
- Includes tools like ThemeBuilder for more control of visual style.
Challenges I experienced
- Steep learning curve and somewhat fragmented documentation.
- State management can get complicated, and handling large data can hurt performance.
- Customizing individual component styles takes patience.
- Subscriptions are per developer and renew yearly, with no genuine free trial-just basic demos.
Pricing
- Starts at $799 per developer per year (Lite Support)
- Advanced support plans and all-in bundles start at $1,299 annually and up
- Full Kendo UI pricing
A Few Other Tools I Evaluated
Here are tools I tested or checked out, but which don’t qualify as the best React component libraries for most apps:
- Tailwind UI: Beautiful designs, but produces HTML snippets-not React components.
- Flutter: Not for React projects.
- React Native: Best for native mobile, not the web.
- Xamarin: Works with C#, not React.
- Ionic Framework: Hybrid platform, React integration is limited.
- NativeScript: Aimed at native mobile development-rarely used with React.
- [Qt Group, JUCE, Avalonia, Mono, Framework7, Quasar Framework, Svelte, Ember, Angular, Vue, Kotlin, Bootstrap, Foundation, jQuery]: Not directly relevant for React, focus on other languages or patterns.
- [NativeBase, Onsen UI, React Native Paper, React Native Elements, UI Kitten, react-native-ui-lib, Ant Design Mobile, Nachos UI, react-native-gifted-chat]: Built for React Native/mobile, not web-focused.
- [AppGyver]: Not a React component toolkit.
- [Tailwind CSS]: Utility classes for styling, not UI components.
- [Bootstrap]: CSS framework, not specific to React.
- [React Native Paper, React Native Elements, react-native-ui-lib]: Targeted for React Native.
Final Thoughts
Most React component libraries I’ve tried fit into one of three groups:
- Overly complex: Tons of features, but only practical for power users.
- Too basic: Fast and pretty, but missing the extras needed for real projects.
- Under-supported: Abandoned or unreliable in ongoing development.
gluestack feels different to me. It provides everything you need for modern app development-universal, copy-and-paste components, flexible theming, great performance, and a clean developer experience. You avoid vendor lock-in, stay cross-platform, and tap into an active open source community. Whether your project is a sleek web dashboard or a scalable mobile app, gluestack’s combination of simplicity, customization, and real universality makes it my go-to pick in the current React landscape.
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