When building a product, website, or application, it's a common question to consider the design system or component library to use to help you ship quality products fast, and deliver value to your customers in a way that scales with your team.
Here's a comparison between Chakra UI and other popular UI or CSS frameworks like Theme UI, Tailwind CSS, and Material UI help you make the best decision.
This comparison strives to be as accurate and as unbiased as possible. If you use any of these libraries and feel the information could be improved, feel free to suggest changes (with notes or evidence of claims) using the "Edit this page on Github" link at the bottom of this page.
Tailwind CSS: CSS Framework that provides atomic CSS classes to help you style components, leaving you to handle lots of other things like accessibility, component composition, keyboard navigation, style overrides, etc.
Chakra UI: A library of carefully created React components that comes with all the styling benefits of Tailwind and takes care of all the details.
Tailwind CSS: If you come from a bootstrap or bulma CSS background, you
might find it easy to pick up Tailwind. However, from a styled-components or
emotion background, the learning curve can be rather steep.
Chakra UI: Comes with a very intuitive, CSS-like, and prop based model of styling components, making it easy to learn. The components name and prop names are also very easy to understand.
Tailwind CSS: Authoring responsive styles in tailwind requires a combination
of pseudo-classes. This can get rather lengthy as your project grows. The API:
<img class="w-16 md:w-32 lg:w-48" src="...">
Chakra UI: Authoring responsive styles in a very easy and intuitive. You can use either the array or object notation.
The API:
<Img w={[16, 32, 48]} src="..."><Img w={{ base: 16, md: 32, lg: 48 }} src="..." />In most applications, its a common challenge to want to override styles for a specific context to match design requirements.
Tailwind CSS: Given that Tailwind is a CSS utility framework, you might need to do figure out the best way to override specific classNames, or write custom CSS.
Chakra UI: Given that Chakra UI styles are prop-based, overrides is as easy as passing a prop.
As mentioned earlier, Tailwind CSS is simply a CSS framework similar to Bootstrap or Bulma CSS. This leaves to handle semantic html structure, meeting the WAI-ARIA requirements, keyboard navigation, etc.
Chakra provides the convenience of Tailwind and all these benefits out the box.
Tailwind CSS: Not supported.
Chakra UI: All components are light and dark mode compatible. You can also author your own light and dark mode experience across your application.
styled-system to provide better component styles and theming.// TO DO (Feel free to submit a PR)
// TO DO (Feel free to submit a PR)
Since Chakra UI uses CSS-in-JS under the hood (emotion + styled system),
this flexibility comes with a small price to pay when it comes to runtime. This
runtime footprint is caused by style computations by styled-system, and
className generation by emotion.
If your app deals with high, frequently changing data that is performance sensitive, you might notice this footprint as your app grows.
We recommend you compare with alternatives before making the decision to use Chakra, however, for most small or medium data-driven applications, we think Chakra UI is a perfect.
My favourite thing about Chakra UI is the community around it. Despite it still being small for now, it's growing daily and, everyone is so helpful and we keep striving for ways to improve Chakra UI's speed, performance and developer experience.
"When I'm pitching Chakra, my main selling point is that Chakra makes it easier to customize components to be entirely your own. MUI has a distinctly "material" look that is difficult to get rid of even if you want to. Chakra strikes a balance of look nice out of the box and can morph into anything"
— Vynlar (View Quote)
"When we were in the process of choosing a component library, like most others that found Chakra, we were looking for something that did a lot of the heavy lifting for us whilst being as unopinionated as possible. This was a big reason that ruled most of the big players out (MUI, Ant). These big players are awesome, don't get me wrong, but because they come with their own design languages, you're kinda stuck with their look.
Then there were a bunch of other medium/small players, such as variations of Bootstrap in React. Among other small issues, these libraries generally don't have large hyper-active communities.
Then, I found Chakra.
I feel like Chakra is becoming a movement, and I'm excited for it."
— ChasinHues (View Quote)