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PrimeReact vs styled-components: What are the differences?

Introduction

PrimeReact and styled-components are two popular libraries used in web development. While PrimeReact is a UI component library, styled-components is a CSS-in-JS library. Both have their own set of features and advantages, making them useful in different scenarios. In this article, we will explore the key differences between PrimeReact and styled-components.

  1. Styling Approach: One of the main differences between PrimeReact and styled-components is the approach they take for styling. PrimeReact utilizes a traditional CSS approach where styles are defined in separate CSS files and applied to components using class names. On the other hand, styled-components follows a CSS-in-JS approach where styles are defined directly in JavaScript files using template literals. This allows for more modular and composable styles, as well as easier theming and dynamic styling.

  2. Component Library vs CSS Library: Another key difference is the main focus of the two libraries. PrimeReact is primarily a UI component library, providing a wide range of pre-built components for web development. It includes components for things like forms, tables, menus, and more. On the other hand, styled-components is focused on providing a powerful toolset for styling components using JavaScript. It allows for dynamic and responsive styles, as well as the ability to create reusable styled components.

  3. Dependency Size: PrimeReact is a comprehensive library that includes a large number of UI components. As a result, it may have a larger dependency size compared to styled-components which is focused on providing styling solutions. This can be a consideration if you are concerned about the overall size of your application or if you need to optimize for performance.

  4. CSS Customization: When it comes to customizing styles, PrimeReact relies on CSS overrides and custom class names. You can customize the styles of PrimeReact components by targeting their CSS class names and applying your own styles using CSS or Sass. On the other hand, styled-components allows for more granular and direct style customization. You can pass props to styled components and conditionally apply styles based on those props, making it easier to create dynamic and reusable components with custom styles.

  5. Theming Support: PrimeReact provides built-in theming support, allowing you to easily customize the look and feel of your application. It provides a set of theme variables that you can override to create your own custom theme. styled-components also supports theming through the use of ThemeProvider. It allows you to define a theme object and pass it down to styled components, making it easy to create consistent and themeable styles across your application.

  6. Integration with Frameworks: PrimeReact is specifically designed for integration with the popular React framework. It provides seamless integration with React's component-based architecture and allows you to leverage the power of React for building UIs. styled-components, on the other hand, is framework-agnostic and can be used with any frontend framework, not just React. This flexibility makes it a great choice if you are working on a project that uses a different framework.

In summary, PrimeReact is a comprehensive UI component library with a traditional CSS styling approach, while styled-components is a CSS-in-JS library focused on providing powerful styling solutions. Although both libraries have their own advantages, the choice between them mainly depends on the specific needs and requirements of your web development project.

Decisions about PrimeReact and styled-components
Luca Restagno
Co-Founder at iterspace · | 5 upvotes · 23K views

Storybook, along with React, styled-components, and Atomic Design, is the perfect tool to boost your front end development productivity. It helps you develop isolated presentational components with a super fast hot reload. It allows to test your props with knobs. Finally you compose, and reuse your components in your app.

You can host your storybook as a static website and share it with the other devs, so they are aware of the components already available in your library, and how to use them.

You can share the same with your UI/UX team, and converge towards a common design system.

You can even run visual regression tests on your library, with storyshots.

Which stack do you use on the Front End?

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Pros of PrimeReact
Pros of styled-components
  • 11
    Editable Table/Tree Table Component in core
  • 1
    Open Source
  • 1
    UI Components
  • 1
    React
  • 11
    Very easy to use and integrate
  • 1
    Huihui

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What is PrimeReact?

PrimeReact is a rich set of open source UI Components for React.

What is styled-components?

Visual primitives for the component age. Use the best bits of ES6 and CSS to style your apps without stress 💅

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What companies use styled-components?
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What tools integrate with PrimeReact?
What tools integrate with styled-components?
What are some alternatives to PrimeReact and styled-components?
Material-UI
Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design.
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.
Bootstrap
Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.
reactstrap
It provides prebuilt Bootstrap 4 components that allow a great deal of flexibility and prebuilt validation. This allows us to quickly build beautiful forms that are guaranteed to impress and provide an intuitive user experience.
PrimeNg
It has a rich collection of components that would satisfy most of the UI requirements of your application like datatable, dropdown, multiselect, notification messages, accordion, breadcrumbs and other input components. So there would be no need of adding different libraries for different UI requirements.
See all alternatives