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Cover image for Top React Component Libraries and Frameworks Every Developer Should Know
Salih Özdemir for Refine

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at refine.dev

Top React Component Libraries and Frameworks Every Developer Should Know

React is the most popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It's easy to use, flexible, and powerful enough that you can build anything from simple apps to complex web applications with it! In this article, we're looking at some UI component frameworks which make developing your next project easier by providing ready-to-go components like buttons or navigation bars - saving time in both design creation as well as coding when getting started quickly.

Material UI

Material UI Cover

MUI offers a wide range of high-quality components that have helped us ship features more quickly. With nearly 77k+ stars on GitHub, the popularity of MUI is rather clear. The Google design system has been integrated into an extended React library with great success.

MUI is a brand, not just an open-source project. This means that they take care of the style and the documentation so that it all looks perfect; it's one that many people love and use daily!

The best part of MUI is how many people use it. There are countless free resources to help you get started. Landing page templates, mockups of blog designs, and portfolio styles are all available. If you can't find what you need, someone has probably already created it.

Features

  • A list of components that ready-to-use, free forever, and has accessibility.
  • Advance and powerful components for complex use-cases.
  • Fully built, out-of-the-box, templates for apps, landing pages, and more.

👉 Showcase

Ant Design

Ant Design Cover

Ant Design is a UI library and design system for enterprise applications. It is the most popular components library on GitHub with over 79k stars.

It has great documentation that includes examples and variants. It is also a robust platform when it comes to customizing the existing components and themes in detail. Furthermore, It has a set of high-quality React components out of the box for free.

One of the drawbacks of Ant Design is that it has a large bundle size, when compared to other React libraries.

Features

  • Enterprise-class UI designed for web applications.
  • Written in TypeScript with predictable static types.
  • Internationalization support.
  • Powerful theme customization in every detail.

👉 Showcase

Chakra UI

Chakra UI Cover

Chakra UI is one of the fastest-growing React UI libraries. It is a simple, modular and accessible component library that gives you the building blocks you need to build your React applications. With over 22.5k stars on GitHub.

Simplicity is one of the terms that come to mind when describing Chakra UI. Its library, as its name suggests, emphasizes the development process rather than just focusing on code. It has excellent documentation will certainly aid with that.

Features

  • Makes it easy to style your components by passing props.
  • Flexible and composable wicth built on top of React UI Primitive.
  • All of components are accessible and its follow the WAI-ARIA guidelines specifications.
  • Most components are dark mode compatible.

👉 Showcase

Mantine

Mantine Cover

Mantine is a full-featured React component library with 100+ customizable components and 30+ hooks that allows you to create fully functional and accessible web applications quickly. Mantine has a lot of packages and components that are ready-to-use and can be used in any project. With over 10k stars on GitHub.

It stands out from other UI design systems with its simple structure and modularity.

Features

  • The core components are extremely extensive and provides niche components like color picker, date-range picker, and timelines.
  • Advanced theme customization and dark mode support.
  • A set of hooks that make it easy to use the components.
  • A full-featured notification system that integrates seamlessly with your theme.

👉 Showcase

Storybook

Storybook Cover

Storybook is a JavaScript tool that allows developers to create organized UI systems making both the building process and documentation more efficient and easier to use. With over 70k stars on GitHub.

It makes development faster and easier by isolating components. This allows you to work on one component at a time. You can develop entire UIs without needing to start up a complex dev stack, force certain data into your database, or navigate around your application.

Features

  • A sandbox to build UIs in isolation so you can develop hard-to-reach states and edge cases.
  • Implement components and pages without needing to fuss with data, APIs, or business logic.
  • Save use cases as stories in plain JavaScript to revisit during development, testing, and QA.
  • Use addons to customize your workflow, automate testing, and integrate with your favorite tools.

👉 Showcase

Refine

Refine Cover

Refine A React-based framework for building internal tools, rapidly. It provides lots of out-of-the box functionality for rapid development, without compromising extreme customizability. Use-cases include, but are not limited to admin panels, B2B applications and dashboards. With over 2.1k stars on Github even though it has been released recently.

Refine is a headless React framework, which means all out-of-the-box features(Routing, Networking, Authentication, Authorization, State Management, Realtime, i18n, etc.), it can be used without being tied to any UI elements or framework. Also, Ant Design as out-of-the-box is supported.

It has many examples to help you get started, as well as documentation. Also it is fully compatible with server side rendering with Next.js.

Features

  • Headless: Works with any UI framework
  • Zero-configuration: One-line setup with superplate. It takes less than a minute to start a project.
  • Out-of-the-box: Routing, networking, authentication, state management, i18n and UI.
  • Backend Agnostic: Connects to any custom backend.
  • Powerful UI: Works seamlessly with integrated Ant Design(It can also be used with any UI Framework).

👉 Showcase

Latest comments (2)

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devbambhaniya profile image
Devshi bambhaniya
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andrewbaisden profile image
Andrew Baisden

Great list I use Storybook the most.