Exploring The Best React Libraries

If your core business is JavaScript, you’ve come to the right place. 

React, developed and maintained by Facebook, has become one of the most popular JavaScript libraries for building user interfaces. To enhance the capabilities of React and streamline development processes, many libraries and tools have emerged. 

Component libraries are important tools for making React development easier. They offer a set of ready-made UI components that developers can use again in different projects. This helps save time and makes the development process more efficient.

Various user-interface frameworks are available because of their wide use that will help you develop a beautiful interface for your React project. In this article, we will explore the top 10 useful react libraries that can significantly boost your productivity and key considerations when choosing the right library.

read more: React-Native vs Native-Script

What are React Component Libraries?

In simple words, React component libraries are like toolkits with ready-to-use building blocks for creating websites or apps. These building blocks are things like buttons, forms, and menus. Instead of starting from scratch, developers can use these pre-made parts instead of starting from scratch to save time and make their work easier. It helps keep things consistent and follow good design practices in React applications.

Let's go ahead and explore the top 10 React libraries

Top React Libraries

React Bootstrap

A library that brings Bootstrap components into React applications. It allows you to use Bootstrap's styling and components seamlessly within a React application. It provides a set of pre-designed UI components like buttons, forms, modals, etc.

Material UI

Material UI is a bunch of components made by Google, following their famous Material Design. It's the most liked UI package in all React libraries, with over 36,000 stars on GitHub. It's easy to use, looks good, is lightweight, and user-friendly. It's been around for a while, but it stays popular because it keeps getting updated regularly.

React Query

React Query serves as a library designed for handling, caching, and updating the server state in React applications. It streamlines processes like data fetching, caching, and state management, simplifying the handling of remote data. It enhances the overall efficiency of managing data in React applications.

Ant Design

Ant Design serves as a React UI library, furnishing a collection of customizable and high-quality components. Tailored for enterprise-level applications, it follows a design style similar to Alibaba's Ant Design System. The library offers a comprehensive set of components suitable for enterprise use, including theming support and a consistent design language.

Chakra UI

Chakra UI is a React UI component library known for its simplicity and modularity. The primary aim is to provide a range of customizable and accessible components that can be easily combined to create user interfaces. The focus is on making customization easy, ensuring accessibility, and promoting the composition of components for UI development.

Headless UI

Headless UI differs from typical UI libraries by not offering pre-designed components. Instead, it provides a collection of entirely accessible and unstyled UI building blocks. This allows developers to construct their custom UI components, ensuring both accessibility and usability. It offers unstyled, accessible UI primitives for creating personalized components with full control over styling.

Grommet

Grommet is a design system built on React, offering a variety of components that are accessible and customizable through themes. Its purpose is to facilitate the creation of responsive and visually uniform user interfaces. The system includes responsive components, supports theming, incorporates accessibility features, and places a strong emphasis on maintaining design consistency.

Redux

Consequently, it’s a simple interface that lets you test your code in various situations and compare the results correctly. Moreover, Redux is one of the topmost React component libraries with the best React frameworks. It contains various DevTools, which help identify changes in your application state, log them, and send error reports.

React Router

React Router, a group of navigational components synchronizes the components of the UI with the browser's address. This makes it effortless to handle navigation in SPA. 

Additionally, it offers vivid nesting support, stable screen-to-screen transitions, and server-side rendering.

React DnD (Drag and Drop)

React DnD is a library for building complex drag-and-drop interfaces in React. It provides a set of higher-order components to enable drag-and-drop functionality with customizable drag previews and backends

Why use React Component Libraries?

Using React component libraries offers several advantages in the development of React-based web applications. Here are some key reasons why developers often choose to use React component libraries:

Easy to use: 

If you're new to this or have yet to improve at it, dealing with CSS can be a bit hard and fun, especially when creating fancy designs and layouts.

Beautiful UI: 

Making things quickly doesn't mean your website or app has to look less nice. A good design that looks good and serves its purpose draws in users. So, you can pick attractive design elements for your project and tweak them to match how you want your app to look and feel.

Less coding, more time developing: 

With ready-made parts, you can write code faster. Instead of using time to code basic things, you can concentrate on the main job – making the application work. The more time you put into developing it, the better the app will turn out.

Consistent Updates and Maintenance: 

Reputable React component libraries are regularly updated to address bugs, and security issues, and to introduce new features. This can save development teams from the burden of maintaining and updating their custom components.

read more: React-Native vs Native-Script

Choosing the right React component library

Choosing the right component library can greatly accelerate the development of your React application. When choosing, always weigh the pros and cons in the context of your project.

Selecting the appropriate React component library depends on various factors such as project requirements, design preferences, and community support. Libraries like Material-UI offer a wide range of pre-designed components with a consistent look and feel, suitable for projects requiring a polished, Google's Material Design-inspired appearance. Ant Design provides a similar comprehensive set but follows a different design language with a focus on enterprise applications. 

If aiming for a more customizable and minimalistic approach, consider Chakra UI or Styled Components for greater flexibility in styling. Ultimately, the choice should align with the project's specific needs, developer familiarity, and the level of community and ongoing development support for long-term maintainability.

Overall, React component libraries are a powerful tool for React developers, providing a foundation of well-designed and tested components that can enhance productivity, maintainability, and the overall quality of web applications.

read more: Is React the best tool for cross-platform development?

FAQ

What is the best React library?

 Material UI is known as a dependable React library that gives you ready-to-use and changeable UI parts. It has extra CSSBaseline components you can use if you want to make sure your UI looks consistent, no matter which React-supporting browser or device you're using.

What is the most used React package? 

Create React App. It's a tool made by Facebook developers that helps you make a React.js project effortlessly. It sets up folders and files, adds necessary tools from the beginning, and assists you in creating, testing, and launching your application.

Is React UI or UX?

 React is a JavaScript library for rendering user interfaces (UI).