What are some alternatives to Headless UI?

What is Headless UI and what are its top alternatives?

Headless UI is a set of fully accessible unstyled UI components that are built to be highly composable. It offers flexible building blocks for creating custom designs while maintaining accessibility and providing a great developer experience. However, it lacks pre-styled components and may require additional styling and customization.

Tailwind UI: Tailwind UI offers a collection of professionally designed, fully accessible components that can be easily customized with Tailwind CSS. It provides a wide range of pre-styled components, but it comes with a cost.
Ant Design: Ant Design is a popular design system with a set of well-designed React UI components. It includes a variety of customizable components and has good documentation, but it may be overwhelming for smaller projects.
Chakra UI: Chakra UI is a simple, modular, and accessible component library for React applications. It offers customizable components and great developer experience, but its customization options may be limited.
Material-UI: Material-UI is a popular React component library that follows Google's Material Design guidelines. It provides a wide range of components with theming support, but it may have a steep learning curve.
Evergreen: Evergreen is a set of React components for building modern web applications. It focuses on simplicity and consistency in design, but it may not have as many components as other libraries.
Rebass: Rebass is a lightweight library of customizable, accessible React UI components. It offers a simple API for styling components, but it may lack some advanced features found in other libraries.
Semantic UI React: Semantic UI React provides a set of React components that follow Semantic UI design principles. It offers a wide variety of components and theming options, but it may have a large bundle size.
Grommet: Grommet is a responsive and accessible component library for React applications. It offers a wide range of components with consistent design and theming support, but it may not have as many customization options as other libraries.
Carbon Design System: Carbon Design System is IBM's open-source design system for digital products and experiences. It provides a set of reusable components, but it may be more suitable for projects within the IBM ecosystem.
Bulma: Bulma is a popular CSS framework with a modern and responsive design. While it's not specifically a React component library, it offers a wide range of styling options that can be used in conjunction with React components.

Top Alternatives to Headless UI

Material-UI
Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design. ...
Ionicons
Premium designed icons for use in web, iOS, Android, and desktop apps. Support for SVG and web font. Completely open source and MIT licensed. ...
Ant Design
An enterprise-class UI design language and React-based implementation. Graceful UI components out of the box, base on React Component. A npm + webpack + babel + dora + dva development framework. ...
Chakra UI
It is a simple, modular and accessible component library that gives you all the building blocks you need to build your React applications. ...
DevExtreme
From Angular and React, to ASP.NET Core or Vue, it includes a comprehensive collection of high-performance and responsive UI widgets for use in traditional web and next-gen mobile applications. The suite ships with a feature-complete data grid, interactive charts widgets, data editors, and much more. ...
ElementUI
It is not focused on Mobile development, mainly because it lacks responsiveness on mobile WebViews. ...
Tailwind UI
Over 400+ professionally designed, fully responsive, expertly crafted component examples you can drop into your Tailwind projects and customize to your heart’s content. ...
Feathers
Build mobile & desktop games and apps with fully-skinnable UI controls. It aims for buttery smooth performance based on the philosophy that cross-platform UI kits shouldn't sacrifice one of the most important benefits of native development. ...

Headless UI alternatives & related posts

Material-UI

2.2K

3.6K

441

Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design.

Stacks2.2K

Followers3.6K

+ 1

Votes441

PROS OF MATERIAL-UI

141
React
82
Material Design
60
Ui components
30
CSS framework
25
Component
14
Looks great
12
Responsive
12
Good documentation
9
LESS
8
Ui component
7
Open source
6
Code examples
6
Flexible
5
JSS
3
Angular
3
Very accessible
3
Fun
3
Supports old browsers out of the box
2
Typescript support
2
# of components
2
Interface
2
Designed for Server Side Rendering
1
Support for multiple styling systems
1
Css
1
Easy to work with
1
Accessibility

CONS OF MATERIAL-UI

35
Hard to learn. Bad documentation
28
Hard to customize
21
Hard to understand Docs
8
Bad performance
7
Extra library needed for date/time pickers
7
For editable table component need to use material-table
2
Typescript Support
1
# of components

COMPARE

Compare Material-UI vs Headless UI

related Material-UI posts

Adebayo Akinlaja

Engineering Manager at Andela · Oct 15, 2019 | 30 upvotes · 3.3M views

Shared insights

I picked up an idea to develop and it was no brainer I had to go with React for the frontend. I was faced with challenges when it came to what component framework to use. I had worked extensively with Material-UI but I needed something different that would offer me wider range of well customized components (I became pretty slow at styling). I brought in Evergreen after several sampling and reads online but again, after several prototype development against Evergreen—since I was using TypeScript and I had to import custom Type, it felt exhaustive. After I validated Evergreen with the designs of the idea I was developing, I also noticed I might have to do a lot of styling. I later stumbled on Material Kit, the one specifically made for React . It was promising with beautifully crafted components, most of which fits into the designs pages I had on ground.

A major problem of Material Kit for me is it isn't written in TypeScript and there isn't any plans to support its TypeScript version. I rolled up my sleeve and started converting their components to TypeScript and if you'll ask me, I am still on it.

In summary, I used the Create React App with TypeScript support and I am spending some time converting Material Kit to TypeScript before I start developing against it. All of these components are going to be hosted on Bit.

If you feel I am crazy or I have gotten something wrong, I'll be willing to listen to your opinion. Also, if you want to have a share of whatever TypeScript version of Material Kit I end up coming up with, let me know.

sleepycatzzz

Apr 20, 2021 | 4 upvotes · 610.6K views

Shared insights

My React website is a simple 5-pager that attaches to a database to store and display registrations and other data. The user (small user base) can change any form elements, but I don't need theme-ing, though that would be fun for the user. reactstrap/react-bootstrap built on Bootstrap 4 sounds dated. I am familiar with reactstrap, but a friend said to try Material-UI. The thought of learning it is interesting, but somehow I think it might be overkill. So... reactstrap, react-bootstrap, or Material UI, which should I use?