8 Best and Most Popular React Libraries in 2019
Thomas De Moor
Posted on December 12, 2019
React is one of the most-loved web frameworks available today. Developed by Facebook and released in 2013, React is widely used by developers to build compelling user interfaces.
React consists of components, which are independent, reusable pieces of code. These components function like JavaScript functions, except that they work in isolation and return HTML via a render function.
Given the open-source nature of React, developers have created amazing React UI component libraries that can drastically speed up your work. Here are 8 of the best and most popular ones.
Material-UI
Material-UI is the most popular React UI component library. It's a set of React components created with Google's Material Design in mind. It's simple, light, user-friendly, and still receives frequent updates.
Material-UI is used by companies as varied as NASA, Capgemini, Bethesda, Uniqlo, and J.P. Morgan.
Ant Design
Ant Design is a design system with a React UI library that features high-quality components and demos for interactive UIs. It's written entirely in TypeScript with predictable static types, making it easy to pick up and understand.
Ant Design supports modern browsers and Internet Explorer 9+, as well as server-side rendering and Electron.
Blueprint
Blueprint is a React UI toolkit built by Palantir, a US tech company specializing in big data analytics. The toolkit features over 40 components and is mostly meant for complex and data-intense desktop applications that run in modern browsers and IE11.
React-Bootstrap
React-Bootstrap relies entirely on the Bootstrap stylesheets and works with the thousands of themes Bootstrap users will be familiar with. Each component has been built from scratch to act as a true React component, without requiring unneeded dependencies like jQuery.
Because the React component model gives you more control over the form and function of each component, React-Bootstrap is built with accessibility in mind. The result is a set of accessible-by-default components, over what is already possible with plain Bootstrap.
Onsen UI
Onsen UI is a great component library if you're looking to build cross-platform mobile web apps. It's a mobile app development framework that uses HTML5 and JavaScript and provides integration with Angular, Vue, and React.
Onsen UI provides tabs, side menu, stack navigation and many other components, all of which have iOS and Android Material Design support and automatic styling that will change the appearance of the app depending on the platform.
Evergreen
Evergreen has UI components particularly well-suited for enterprise web apps. Its components are built on a React UI Primitive and are quite flexible as a result. They include buttons, menus, toggles, overlays, text inputs, and more.
Grommet
Grommet is a component library meant for responsive and accessible mobile-first web apps. It provides accessibility, modularity, responsiveness, and theming in one small package. It's used by companies like Netflix, GE, Uber, Boeing, and others.
Elemental UI
The developers of Elemental UI believe that there's a need for a high quality, modular set of UI scaffolding components and controls for React that are built from the outset to natively implement React patterns.
As such, they built Elemental UI, which helps you with CSS, buttons, forms, spinners, modals, and other components. The project is still under development, but has already garnered over 4,000 stars on GitHub.
Do you use other React UI libraries? Which ones? Let me know in the comments 👇.
Posted on December 12, 2019
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