The Frontend Hitchhiker's Guide: UI Libraries

• Vue.js

  381 206,901 7.9 TypeScript

  This is the repo for Vue 2. For Vue 3, go to https://github.com/vuejs/core

  

Vue feels is like the de facto react alternative. It argues some performance improvement over react and doesn't require you to write JSX or CSS in JavaScript.

• Tailwind CSS

  1,276 78,166 9.4 TypeScript

  A utility-first CSS framework for rapid UI development.

  

These days it feels like this wouldn't be a Dev.to post without mentioning tailwind. It's a highly popular library for good reason. There's so many utility classes you can tweak the smallest details of you app needing to write any CSS.

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io sponsored

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

• React

  1,691 221,535 9.8 JavaScript

  The library for web and native user interfaces.

  

You are probably wondering why this wasn't at the top. According to the State of JS survey, ReactJS has been the most used 'Front-end Framework' since 2016. React is featured 5th in this post because it is both a library and a framework.

• qunit

  8 4,006 7.3 JavaScript

  🔮 An easy-to-use JavaScript unit testing framework.

  

However, jQuery is still used today and has spawned other projects like jQuery UI and Quint.

• Materialize

  50 38,860 0.0 JavaScript

  Materialize, a CSS Framework based on Material Design

This is my personal pick for putting together a web app quickly. Materialize CSS is great for making an app that follows the material design specification.

• jQuery

  166 58,862 8.5 JavaScript

  jQuery JavaScript Library

  

This legacy library is more of an honourable mention. Around 2017-2019 it was unfathomable to build a website without jQuery. It provided easy to use APIs for cross browser DOM manipulation, AJAX and attaching event handlers.

• Bootstrap

  530 167,414 9.6 JavaScript

  The most popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.

  

Another popular library that is usually the first for many devs is Bootstrap. It's not as flexible as tailwind but its easy to use and has tons of themes, and examples.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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