Top 5 Vue Component Libraries | Summer 2023
Vue.js is one of the most popular JavaScript-based frontend frameworks and with good reason. The open-source framework has since its release in 2014 become a stable in the front-end world for being easy to learn, performant and incredibly versatile, making it ideal creating scalable web applications.
Vue has one of the most active and integrated ecosystems of open-source libraries and tools, ranging from performant state-management libraries to component libraries, making it easy to pick and choose in order to create the ideal development environment for your project.
In this article we'll go through the top 5 Vue component libraries that we have encountered in this summer.
Vuetify is one of the most popular Vue.js component libraries around. It is built on top of Google's Material Design and comes with a large number of flexible, accessible and easy-to-use components, making it an ideal choice for building scalable and robust web interfaces.
Apart from its large number of components, Vuetify also comes with core features such as icon support, right-to-left typography and internationalization (i18n).
Vuetify is tree-shakable, meaning that your production bundle will only contain the bare necessary code for the components and features that you have used, while the rest will be "tree-shaken" away.
Headless UI is a component library created by the same team behind Tailwind CSS. As the name suggests, Headless UI is a headless component library, meaning that it does not ship with any styling, making it ideal for crafting custom design systems without having to think about accessibility and other common pitfalls when creating reusable components.
PrimeVue is a component library created by PrimeFaces, who is also the team behind the similar component libraries PrimeNG for Angular and PrimeReact for React. PrimeVue consists of a large set of accessible and ease-to-use components.
It is possible to use PrimeVue in either an "unstyled" mode which makes it possible to add custom stylings to the components or a "styled" mode with prebuilt stylings for faster development or prototyping.
NuxtLabs UI is a component library developed by the team behind Nuxt, a popular meta-framework for Vue.js. NuxtLabs UI is a fully styled component library built on top of Headless UI and TailwindCSS and brings a sleek look for building modern web applications.
Nuxt UI also comes with cool features such as keyboard shortcuts, custom theming and a collection of more than 100,000 icons through Iconify.
Similar to Headless UI, Ark UI is a headless component library developed by the same team that is behind Chakra UI, another popular React component library. While still in early development, Ark UI consists of a large amount of unstyled components that can be used to create custom design systems which adhere to the best accessibility practices.
Apart from being available for Vue.js, Ark UI is also available for React and Solid.
Final words
By looking at our top list of the 5 best Vue component libraries of this summer, it is important to note that there are differences between component libraries both in terms of available components and features, but also whether you want more flexibility through a headless component library or if you want to develop faster using prestyled components.