Top React UI Frameworks to Build Applications

Shiva Kumar Gurung
4 min readAug 28, 2023

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Top React UI Frameworks

The world that we live in is fast-paced and getting things done faster has become the norm and need of the hour. To address this, several frontend frameworks and UI component libraries have been developed to cater to the developers’ needs. React CSS frameworks and component libraries help to fast-track the web development process. Not only this but they also offer various other advantages. Some of the pros of using them are:

  • Reduces the likelihood of the occurrence of bugs and errors
  • Supports cross-browser compatibility
  • Helps to ensure the responsiveness of the websites so that they look good on all screen sizes

Now that we have understood how CSS frameworks are advantageous to us in frontend web development, let’s look at some of the top React UI Frameworks.

  1. Material-UI
  2. Ant Design
  3. React Bootstrap
  4. Chakra UI
  5. Tailwind CSS

1. Material-UI

A screenshot of the Material UI homepage

Material-UI is probably one of the most popular React component libraries. It offers a comprehensive set of React components that are simple and lightweight. One other thing that makes Material-UI preferable is the fact that its components meet Google’s Material Design specification. The components are ready for use in production and customizable.

2. Ant Design

A screenshot of the Ant Design homepage

Ant Design is another popular UI library that provides a set of reusable and customizable React components. Its primary focus is on developing components that support the development of enterprise products.

Ant Design, unlike Bootstrap, is more of a design system that ensures that the designs are coherent. As a result, the UI looks consistent. It provides components like Buttons, Form, Table, Modal, Layout, Pagination, Dropdown, Menu, Icon, Typography, Input, and so on.

3. React Bootstrap

A screenshot of the React Bootstrap homepage

React Bootstrap is built with compatibility and accessibility in mind. Due to this reason, the React Bootstrap components work seamlessly with modern technologies. Likewise, its accessibility feature ensures that people with visual, hearing and cognitive impairments can easily access the content. Its components are optimized for responsiveness while being easy to use.

4. Chakra UI

A screenshot of the Chakra UI homepage

Chakra UI is an open-source React components library for building user interfaces. It has a community of active developers maintaining the framework. The key features of Chakra UI are

  • Accessibility: W3C specification WAI-ARIA standards are followed to make web apps accessible to people with disabilities.
  • Customizable and Themeable: It provides a set of customizable and themeable components that can be modified to meet the design needs of the system.
  • Light and Dark UI: It allows the developers to optimize the web apps for different color themes including light and dark UI.

5. Tailwind CSS

A screenshot of the Tailwind CSS homepage

Though Tailwind CSS is not a React UI framework per se, it is widely preferred by React developers for designing and implementing user interfaces and React components. What makes it a popular choice among developers for styling React apps is that it provides more freedom for creating React components instead of having to use pre-built components thereby making the website look like every other website. It has a set of predefined CSS utility classes that can be applied to create components.

Besides these, there are other React UI libraries out there like Semantic UI React, Grommet, Carbon Design System, Rebass (a lightweight library), Evergreen, Blueprint (for building data-dense applications), Retool (best for internal operations), and so on.

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