Top React Design Libraries

Quick Summary

Bored of using a number of React design libraries? Look no further! Below, we’ve rounded up some of the best and most effective solutions to enhance your react development journey. From beginner to advanced level developers, this guide will help you familiarize with some of the powerful tools that can bring out the best in your projects done with the use of popular Popular react libraries. So now, without further ado, let’s immerse ourselves and find out what design libraries are worth trying out for the next React development!

What are React Design Libraries?

React design libraries are the sets of components, themes, tools, and designs that can be implemented as templates while creating the new applications based on React. By instances buttons, inputs, layouts they offer, styling solutions, and form management tools among other customizable components.

Developers are able to use these libraries from React design while creating nice and efficient applications without the necessity to design every individual element of the user interface. Through the use of a design library, developers can save a lot of time, create better code and ultimately have better user experience design on the interfaces of their React applications. Let’s explore some of the most popular and versatile React design libraries:

Top Design Libraries in React

Material UI

Ever wanted to build user interfaces that are not only functional but also aesthetically pleasing and intuitive? Look no further than Material UI, a powerful and open-source library for React developers. Material UI empowers you to leverage Google’s Material Design principles, a design language renowned for its clean layouts, vibrant colors, responsiveness, and subtle animations. By incorporating these elements, you can create user experiences that are both visually captivating and easy to navigate. Material UI stands out as a leading UI component library for React, boasting a thriving community and widespread adoption. While its impressive number of GitHub stars (over 90K) underscores its popularity.

Features and Benefits:

Material UI goes beyond aesthetics, offering a robust feature set that streamlines your development process:

• Extensive Component Collection: Say goodbye to building UI elements from scratch. Material UI provides a vast library of pre-built components like buttons, text fields, menus, cards, dialogs, and more.
• Adherence to Material Design: Benefit from Google’s design expertise. Material UI components follow Material Design principles, ensuring a consistent, modern, and user-friendly look and feel for your application.
• Customization: While Material Design provides a strong foundation, you still have the power to personalize components to match your specific branding or design preferences.
• Theming: Take control of your application’s visual identity. Material UI allows you to create custom themes that define colors, typography, and spacing, creating a cohesive user experience.
• Accessibility: Reach a wider audience. Material UI prioritizes accessibility, guaranteeing your application is usable by people with disabilities.
• Internationalization (i18n): Build global applications. Material UI supports building multilingual applications, catering to a broader user base.
• Performance: Keep your app responsive. The components are optimized for performance, ensuring your application remains fast and user-friendly.
• Large Community and Support: Never feel lost. Material UI boasts a large and active developer community, along with comprehensive documentation and tutorials, providing ample support and resources for learning the library.

In essence, Material UI is your one-stop shop for crafting beautiful and functional user interfaces in React. With its extensive features, ease of use, and active community, it’s a library that empowers you to bring your design vision to life.

React Bootstrap

React Bootstrap bridges the gap between two popular web development tools: React, a powerful JavaScript library for building user interfaces, and Bootstrap, a widely used CSS framework known for its responsive design and pre-built components. React Bootstrap essentially translates Bootstrap’s components and styles into reusable React components. This seamless integration allows you to leverage the benefits of Bootstrap within your React projects, saving you time and effort in building UI elements and ensuring a responsive layout across different devices. Following closely behind Material UI, React Bootstrap is another widely adopted UI library for React, boasting over 22K stars on GitHub, demonstrating its strong community and user base.

Features and Benefits:

Here’s what makes React Bootstrap a valuable asset for React developers:

• Familiar and Easy to Learn: If you’re already familiar with Bootstrap, React Bootstrap offers a smooth learning curve. The component names and structure closely resemble Bootstrap, making it easy to pick up for existing Bootstrap users.
• Pre-built, Responsive Components: Get a head start on building UIs. React Bootstrap provides a collection of pre-built, responsive components like buttons, forms, navigation bars, modals, and more. These components automatically adapt to different screen sizes, ensuring your application looks great on any device.
• Lightweight and Efficient: React Bootstrap prioritizes performance. The components are built to be lightweight and efficient, keeping your application fast and responsive.
• Customization: While Bootstrap offers a baseline design, you still have control over the look and feel. You can customize components using CSS classes or even build your own custom components on top of React Bootstrap.
• Reduced Code and Improved Maintainability: By using pre-built components, you write less code, making your project more maintainable and easier to collaborate on with other developers.
• Large Community and Support: Benefit from a vast ecosystem. React Bootstrap enjoys a large and active community of developers, along with extensive documentation and tutorials, providing ample support and resources for learning and troubleshooting.

In summary, React Bootstrap simplifies the process of integrating Bootstrap’s functionality into your React applications. It offers a familiar structure, pre-built components, customization options, and a strong support system, making it a valuable tool for building modern, responsive web applications.

Ant Design

In the realm of React development, crafting user interfaces for complex enterprise applications requires a robust and feature-rich UI library. Enter Ant Design, an open-source solution designed specifically to meet the needs of these demanding projects. Developed by Ant Group, the powerhouse behind Alipay and Alibaba, Ant Design boasts a comprehensive collection of high-quality UI components meticulously crafted for enterprise-grade applications. These components prioritize functionality, clarity, and efficiency, ensuring your application empowers users to navigate complex workflows with ease. Ant Design is another heavyweight contender in the UI library arena, boasting an impressive 90K stars on GitHub, signifying its widespread adoption and popularity among React developers.

Features and Benefits:

Ant Design empowers you to build feature-rich and user-friendly enterprise applications with the following advantages:

• Extensive Component Library: Ant Design offers a vast array of pre-built components catering specifically to enterprise needs. This includes data tables, complex forms, charts, navigation menus, and more, saving you significant development time.
• Focus on Accessibility: Accessibility is paramount for enterprise applications. Ant Design ensures your application is usable by a wider audience, adhering to accessibility best practices.
• Internationalization (i18n): Reach a global audience. Ant Design supports building multilingual applications, allowing you to cater to users worldwide.
• Customization: While the components prioritize functionality, you can still customize them to match your branding or design preferences.
• Theming: Create a cohesive user experience. Ant Design allows you to define custom themes, including colors, typography, and spacing, for a consistent brand identity.
• TypeScript Support: Benefit from improved code maintainability and reduced errors. Ant Design is written in TypeScript, providing predictable static types for a more robust development experience.
• Development Tools: Streamline your workflow. Ant Design offers a suite of development tools to accelerate your development process.
• Large Community and Support: Never feel alone. Ant Design has a thriving community of developers, along with extensive documentation and tutorials, providing ample support for learning and troubleshooting.

In conclusion, Ant Design is a powerful UI library ideally suited for building feature-rich and user-friendly enterprise applications in React.  Its extensive component library, focus on accessibility, and robust development tools make it a valuable asset for any React developer tackling complex projects.

Chakra UI

In the realm of React development, where efficiency and aesthetics go hand-in-hand, Chakra UI emerges as a powerful contender. This open-source library offers a comprehensive set of pre-built UI components designed to streamline your development process and empower you to create accessible user interfaces with ease. Unlike traditional UI libraries, Chakra UI champions a distinct philosophy – simplicity and modularity. It provides a collection of foundational building blocks that prioritize ease of use and extensive customization. This approach allows developers to rapidly construct sleek, modern interfaces while retaining complete control over the final design.With a rapidly growing community and over 36K stars on GitHub, Chakra UI is establishing itself as a strong contender in the React UI library landscape.

Features and Benefits of Chakra UI:

• Effortless Development: Chakra UI prioritizes developer experience. Its components are well-documented, employ intuitive naming conventions, and often require minimal configuration to integrate seamlessly into your project. This translates to faster development cycles and less time spent wrestling with complex libraries.
• Accessibility First: Inclusivity is a core principle of Chakra UI. The library ensures its components adhere to accessibility best practices, guaranteeing your application is usable by a wider audience, including users with disabilities.
• Customization Powerhouse: While Chakra UI offers a pre-defined design system, it doesn’t restrict your creativity. You can extensively customize individual components or create entirely new themes to match your specific design vision. This flexibility empowers you to craft unique user interfaces without sacrificing the core benefits of the library.
• Modular by Design: Chakra UI’s components are built with modularity in mind. This allows you to easily mix and match components to create complex UIs without worrying about styling conflicts or inconsistencies.
• Performance Optimized: Speed is crucial for a positive user experience. Chakra UI prioritizes performance optimization, ensuring your applications remain responsive and fast-loading, even with intricate UIs.
• Theming Made Easy: Establish a consistent visual identity throughout your application. Chakra UI’s theming capabilities allow you to define a global theme that governs the look and feel of all components. You can even create variations of the theme for different parts of your application.
• Active Community and Support: Never feel alone in your development journey. Chakra UI boasts a vibrant and supportive community of developers. Should you encounter any challenges, you can leverage extensive documentation, tutorials, and a readily available community forum to find solutions and assistance.

In essence, Chakra UI is a breath of fresh air for React developers seeking a balance between speed, accessibility, and design control. Its intuitive approach, coupled with a rich feature set, makes it an ideal choice for building modern and user-friendly web applications.

Semantic UI

Looking for a UI library for React that prioritizes readability and ease of use? Semantic UI might be the perfect fit. Here’s a closer look: Semantic UI is an open-source UI framework built on top of jQuery and CSS. It takes a unique approach, utilizing class names that directly correspond to the HTML element they style. This makes Semantic UI code incredibly readable and intuitive, especially for developers familiar with HTML.  Imagine using classes like “ui button” or “ui menu” to style your components – that’s the power of Semantic UI! Semantic UI stands out as a well-regarded React UI library with over 51,000 stars on GitHub, indicating its popularity and strong adoption within the developer community.

Features and Benefits:

Semantic UI offers a range of features that enhance your React development experience:

• Readability: As mentioned earlier, Semantic UI’s class names are self-explanatory, making code easy to understand and maintain, even for those new to the library.
• Extensive Component Collection: Similar to other UI libraries, Semantic UI provides a vast collection of pre-built UI components like buttons, forms, menus, accordions, and more. This saves you time and effort in building UI elements from scratch.
• Responsive Design: Out of the box, Semantic UI components are responsive, ensuring your application adapts seamlessly to different screen sizes.
• Theming: While the default styles are visually appealing, Semantic UI allows you to create custom themes to match your branding or design preferences.
• Accessibility: The library prioritizes accessibility by ensuring your application is usable by people with disabilities.
• Large Community and Support: Despite not being a React-specific library, Semantic UI has a large and active community of developers. You’ll find plenty of resources, documentation, and tutorials to help you get started.

While Semantic UI might not be the most feature-rich library compared to some React-specific options, its emphasis on readability and ease of use makes it a strong contender for projects that prioritize maintainability and a smooth learning curve.

Next UI

While Material UI reigns supreme in the React UI library world, there’s a new contender making waves: Next UI. This open-source library offers a comprehensive set of features and a focus on performance and accessibility, making it a compelling choice for modern React developers. Next UI is a relatively young but rapidly growing library. It provides a vast collection of pre-built React components that adhere to modern design principles. The library prioritizes clean code, developer experience, and ease of use, making it ideal for building user interfaces quickly and efficiently.

Features and Benefits:

Here’s what sets Next UI apart:

• Performance-focused: Next UI is built with performance in mind. Its components are optimized for speed, ensuring your applications remain responsive and deliver a smooth user experience.
• Accessibility: Next UI prioritizes accessibility, guaranteeing your application is usable by everyone. It follows WCAG guidelines to ensure your UI caters to users with disabilities.
• Extensive Component Collection: Similar to Material UI, Next UI offers a wide range of pre-built components like buttons, inputs, menus, cards, modals, and more, saving you development time.
• Intuitive API: Next UI boasts a user-friendly API that makes it easy to learn and use. Even developers new to React UI libraries can quickly grasp the concepts and start building UIs.
• Customization: While Next UI provides beautiful pre-built components, you can still customize them to match your specific design needs.
• Dark Mode Support: Next UI offers built-in support for dark mode, allowing users to switch between a light and dark theme for a more personalized experience.
• Lazy Loading: Improve your application’s initial load time. Next UI supports lazy loading for components, ensuring only the necessary elements are loaded when needed.
• Growing Community: Though newer, Next UI has a rapidly growing community of developers. This translates to more resources, tutorials, and support as the library matures.

Overall, Next UI is a promising option for React developers seeking a performant, accessible, and user-friendly UI library. Its focus on modern design principles and ease of use makes it a strong contender in the React UI landscape.

Kendo UI

Developed by Progress, Kendo UI transcends basic UI elements, offering a comprehensive solution for building modern web applications. It boasts an extensive library of over 110+ components (grids, charts, schedulers, dropdowns, menus, etc.), reducing development time and ensuring a consistent user experience. Kendo UI further empowers you with powerful data visualization tools for creating interactive charts and graphs, a client-side data source for enhanced responsiveness, and a built-in MVVM library that simplifies data binding and application logic for a clean and maintainable codebase.

Features and Benefits:

Kendo UI offers a multitude of features that make it a valuable asset for web developers:

• Rich Set of Components: As mentioned earlier, Kendo UI provides a vast library of customizable components, eliminating the need to build UI elements from scratch.
• Responsive Design: Kendo UI components are built to adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes and devices, ensuring your application delivers a great user experience across platforms.
• Accessibility: Kendo UI prioritizes accessibility, guaranteeing your application is usable by people with disabilities.
• Theming: Create a unique look and feel for your application with Kendo UI’s theming capabilities. Define custom themes to control colors, typography, and spacing.
• Performance Optimization: Kendo UI components are optimized for performance, ensuring your application remains fast and responsive, even with complex data sets.
• Integration with Popular Frameworks: Kendo UI integrates seamlessly with popular JavaScript frameworks like jQuery, Angular, React, and Vue.js, allowing you to leverage its features within your preferred framework environment.

While Kendo UI offers a free trial, it’s a commercially licensed product. However, its extensive features, comprehensive support, and focus on performance make it a compelling choice for developers building complex and data-driven web applications.

Blueprint

Blueprint is a React-based UI library specifically designed for crafting complex, data-rich web interfaces targeted towards desktop applications. Developed by Palantir Technologies, it prioritizes functionality and performance for applications that handle large datasets and require a user experience optimized for mouse and keyboard interaction.

Features and Benefits:

Here’s what makes Blueprint a strong choice for desktop web applications:

• Focus on Data Density: Blueprint offers a collection of UI components designed to effectively present and interact with large amounts of data. This includes components like tables, grids, and forms that excel at handling complex data structures.
• Accessibility: Blueprint prioritizes accessibility, ensuring your application is usable by people with disabilities.
• Performance Optimization: The components are built for performance, guaranteeing your application remains responsive and efficient when dealing with heavy data loads.
• Theming: Customize the look and feel of your application with Blueprint’s theming capabilities. Define custom themes to control colors, typography, and spacing.
• Integration with React: As a React library, Blueprint seamlessly integrates with the React ecosystem, allowing you to leverage its features within your React application.
• Focus on Desktop Experiences: Unlike some UI libraries targeting mobile-first experiences, Blueprint prioritizes desktop interactions. This makes it ideal for applications designed primarily for mouse and keyboard use.

While Blueprint might not be the best choice for all types of web applications, its focus on data density, performance, and desktop-centric design makes it a valuable asset for developers building complex and data-driven web interfaces for desktop environments.

React Redux

React Redux is a powerful library that streamlines state management within React applications. It elegantly bridges the gap between React’s component-based architecture and the centralized state management approach offered by Redux. React, while excellent at building user interfaces, can struggle with managing complex application state, especially as your application grows. Here’s where React Redux steps in. It integrates seamlessly with Redux, a popular state management library, providing a clear and efficient way to handle application state within your React components.

Features and Benefits:

Here’s how React Redux simplifies state management in your React projects:

• Centralized State Storage: React Redux introduces a central store to hold your application’s entire state. This centralized approach ensures all components have access to the latest state information, promoting consistency and easier data management.
• Predictable State Updates: React Redux enforces a unidirectional data flow. Actions are dispatched to the store, triggering reducers (pure functions) that update the state in a predictable manner. This predictability makes debugging and reasoning about your application state much easier.
• Improved Reusability: By separating state logic from UI components, React Redux promotes code reusability. You can create reusable components that connect to the store and utilize the state they need, without duplicating state management code.
• Testability: React Redux fosters a testing-friendly environment. The separation of concerns allows you to isolate and test state logic independently, improving the overall maintainability and reliability of your application.
• Large Community and Support: Leverage the combined power of React and Redux communities. React Redux benefits from the extensive documentation, tutorials, and support available for both libraries.

In essence, React Redux empowers you to manage complex application state efficiently within your React projects. It offers a structured approach for handling state updates, promotes code reusability, and simplifies testing, making it a valuable tool for building robust and scalable React applications.

Visx

Visx isn’t quite a full-fledged UI library like Material UI or Kendo UI. Instead, it leans more towards data visualization. Developed by Airbnb, Visx is a collection of low-level React components specifically designed for building custom charts and graphs. It provides a flexible foundation upon which you can create tailored visualizations to meet your specific data representation needs.

Features and Benefits:

While not offering a pre-built set of charts, Visx empowers you with the following functionalities:

• Low-Level Building Blocks: Visx offers fundamental building blocks like axes, scales, and shapes. These components allow you to have granular control over the visual elements that make up your charts.
• Customization: The beauty of Visx lies in its customizability. You can tailor every aspect of your visualizations, from the visual style to the data mapping and interactions.
• Flexibility: Visx isn’t limited to creating specific chart types. You can use its components to build a wide variety of visualizations, from basic bar charts to complex network graphs.
• Integration with Other Libraries: Visx integrates well with other React libraries, allowing you to combine it with UI components or data management solutions to create comprehensive data visualization experiences.

Overall, Visx is a powerful tool for developers who want to create unique and highly customized visualizations for their React applications. However, it requires a deeper understanding of data visualization concepts and potentially more development effort compared to using pre-built chart libraries.