PrimeReact is an advanced UI component library for React. Let's see how it stacks up against the pack; Material-UI, Ant, Chakra-UI and ReactBootstrap, well known React UI libraries.
As a disclaimer, author of this article is PrimeTek, the company that created PrimeReact. In case you have feedback, please just add a comment and we'll update the necessary parts.
About PrimeReact
PrimeReact is a member of the Prime UI component suites featuring PrimeFaces, PrimeNG and PrimeVue. All of these libraries are open source and free to use under MIT License. PrimeTek has been developing UI Component libraries since 2005 which are used in the whole world by millions of developers Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, corporations, institutions and freelancer projects.
Take a look at NPM Stats of PrimeTek to learn more about the adoption and popularity. At the time of writing it has reached 40 million downloads. As a side note, PrimeFaces is published to Maven Central and not included in the list.
Comparison Table
Here is a an overview of features that are usually considered when choosing a UI library.
| PrimeReact | MaterialUI | Ant | ChakraUI | ReactBootstrap | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Design Agnostic | ✅ | ||||
| Material Theme | ✅ | ✅ | |||
| Bootstrap Theme | ✅ | ✅ | |||
| Fluent UI Theme | ✅ | ||||
| Theme Builder | ✅ | ✅ | |||
| Accessibility | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Enterprise Support | ✅ | ✅ | |||
| Premium Themes | ✅ | ✅ | |||
| Tree Shaking | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Design Agnostic and Themes
Being design agnostic is what sets PrimeReact apart from the pack. Material-UI is based on material design, Ant and Chakra have their own style and ReactBootstrap is depends on Bootstrap. PrimeReact does not enforce a specific design and provides themes for Material Design, Bootstrap, FluentUI and numerous custom designs as well as the ability to implement your own style guides.
Imagine that in a project you need to switch from Material to Bootstrap or a custom theme, with PrimeReact you don't need to rewrite your application with a new library, you just change the theme.css and it will take 5 seconds. The possibilities are endless, you'll be able to package the same app to different clients with different themes with their own look and feel.
Accessibility
PrimeReact components are implemented based on the WCAG guidelines and follow the best practices outlined here.
- Utilize semantic HTML where suitable.
- Use ARIA roles and attributes to describe an element.
- Implement keyboard navigation and screen reader support.
- Use colors to support the suggested contrast ratios.
Enterprise Support
PrimeReact PRO is the official support service. With PrimeReact PRO, it's easy to support, tune and add features to PrimeReact as if it were an in-house framework.
Premium Themes
PrimeReact offers numerous create-react-app templates. Visit PrimeReact Showcase official website to view the PrimeReact templates.
The Winner
React ecosystem is blessed with great UI component libraries. The friendly competition is beneficial to the React community who is the actual winner of this comparison because no matter what you choose, it won't be a wrong decision.
Authored By
Cagatay Civici
PrimeTek
Discussion (17)
Nice ad for PrimeReact
Isn't that what's internet all about? People selling their "skills" on LinkedIn. People selling their humor on Reddit. People selling their bodies on Instagram.
Yeah you're right. But I expected a little more depth and actual comparisons. Rather than a comparison table showing prime react is perfect and all the other libraries are bad.
BTW prime react documentation is inferior to material-ui IMHO. it's not in the table.
I didn't used prime react yet, but having a look at the codebase on their git account made mw laugh. this library is already old and i don't believe it's better than any of the listed ui kits in the comparison.
Some of the Suggestions to make PrimeReact more popular.
Create responsive multi level Navbar (Header menu) component.
Create vs code extension which can provide intelligence support fot PrimeReact props while using it in react components.
Remove "p" prefix from PrimeReact classes as it make us typing lot of keystrokes.
If you implement suggested changes I'm sure many people will come to PrimeReact.
Thank you for the feedback.
Maybe change the post title to "Why use Prime React" is a good idea.
It's don't have any valid comparation, you just talking about React Prime features.
The table seems to do just that.
loading all css in head is a technique used in 2010. in may google will roll page experience update which will make all core web vitals a ranking factor. this library better adapt. importing css for 50 components is not the way to do frontend in 2021.
You can easily customize what to import with the Theme Designer to optimize your bundle size.
Chakra-ui is accessible
thanks for the information very helpful
@primetek which one is most light-wait? That's the one thing that bugs me about most UI libraries.
If anyone likes this article, they may also appreciate github.com/dimitropoulos/react-ui-... which is similar and covers many frameworks
This is awsome!
Antd!
I agree that this post is not the actual comparison. And I have looked into the docs and i found it useful. It covers all the points that the components have to offer.