Vue.js is a leading JavaScript framework for building user interfaces and single-page applications. Its component-based architecture allows for easy reuse of UI elements. The Vue ecosystem offers third-party component libraries, speeding up development by providing pre-built elements and themes. This guide covers the top 15 Vue.js UI component libraries – from popular incumbent options to newer lightweight alternatives.
We will explore each library’s key features, components offered, themes and customization options, documentation and learning resources, popularity, and other details to help you pick the right one for your next Vue project.
What Is a Vue.js UI Component Library?
A Vue component library is a collection of reusable, pre-built UI components designed specifically for Vue.js, a popular JavaScript framework for building user interfaces. These components encapsulate specific functionalities or visual elements, such as buttons, input fields, models, and more, providing a consistent and efficient way to develop web applications. Vue component libraries streamline the development process by offering ready-made solutions that adhere to design patterns and best practices, enabling developers to create responsive and aesthetically pleasing user interfaces with less effort.
These libraries often follow a modular approach, allowing developers to integrate and customize components within their Vue applications easily. Vue component libraries promote code reusability, maintainability, and a cohesive design language throughout an application, ultimately enhancing the development workflow and accelerating the creation of Vue.js-based projects.
Top Vue.js UI Component Libraries
To find the best Vue.js UI component libraries, we looked for ones that meet these conditions:
- It needs to be regularly updated and taken care of.
- It should provide a variety of components for different situations.
- The library should have easy-to-understand documentation with examples.
- Vue developers should like and use it.
- Consider how well it performs, how easy it is to use, and if it allows customization.
Now, let’s talk about our favorite and top Vue.js UI component libraries.
BootstrapVue
Bootstrap Vue is a UI library that provides Bootstrap 4 components and a grid system for Vue.js. With over 80 components and 600+ icons, BootstrapVue allows you to build responsive, mobile-first interfaces with Bootstrap semantics, styling, and conventions in Vue projects.
Key features:
- Over 80 Bootstrap components like Alerts, Buttons, Cards, Navbars, Tables, etc.
- Bootstrap Vue Icons – icon components for over 600+ Bootstrap Icons
- Responsive grid system and container layout components
- Extensive customization options using props
- Smaller bundle size alternative to Bootstrap
- Integrates effortlessly with other Bootstrap plugins
Bootstrap Vue components render ideally in Vue without jQuery dependency. It is one of the most popular Vue.js UI component libraries, with over 1.6 million monthly downloads. The documentation includes live examples, Props API, and styling options for all components.
Vuetify
Vuetify is an extensive Material Design component library for Vue.js. It contains over 80 responsive components and a grid system to layout responsive interfaces.
Key features:
- Material Design styled-components
- Over 80 reusable components
- Customizable themes using SASS/SCSS
- Responsive grid system based on Flexbox
- Components optimized for desktop and mobile
- Smaller bundle size with tree-shaking
- Supports light and dark modes
- Extensive documentation with examples
With over 3 million monthly downloads, Vuetify is one of the most popular Vue UI libraries. The extensive component collection covers the most common interface elements. It also offers advanced components like data iterators, data tables, and calendars. You can customize and theme all components using CSS variables.
Vue Material
As another popular Material Design UI library, Vue Material offers over 60 customizable components. It provides responsive application layouts using Flexbox-based grids.
Key Features:
- Style components using Material Design principles
- Includes 60+ UI components
- Customize colors, typography, and shapes
- SASS variables for theming
- Responsive flexbox-based grid
- Optimized for desktop and mobile
- Light and dark modes
- Supports Vue 2 and Vue 3
The theming system allows you to customize colors, fonts, shapes, and transitions using SASS. Components come with rich documentation covering examples, API docs, and theming options. While not as extensive as Vuetify, Vue Material provides all the common component needs for most projects.
Quasar
Quasar is an open-source Vue component library that allows you to quickly build responsive websites, PWAs, hybrid mobile Apps, and Electron apps using the same codebase.
Key features:
- 100+ responsive Vue components
- Unified responsive APIs for web, mobile, and desktop apps
- Material Design and iOS-styled themes
- Build PWAs, SSR Apps, Mobile/Desktop Apps
- Flexbox-based responsive layout/grid system
- Extensive theming capabilities with SCSS variables
- Auto importing of components
It offers 140+ components, including App layout, forms, buttons, menus, etc. Components come in 4 themes – Material Design, iOS or App Styled, Bootstrap, and Bulma styled versions. So you can pick the design whichever you want.
The starter kits and CLI help scaffold cross-platform Vue projects with hot-reload and tree-shaking already set up. With a strong focus on unified responsive APIs, Quasar lets you use the same Vue codebase across platforms, reducing duplication.
Buefy
Buefy is a lightweight Vue component library using the Bulma CSS framework and design. It contains over 30 responsive UI components with a Material Design-inspired style.
Key features:
- Lightweight component library
- 30+ reusable components
- Material-inspired style
- Built with Bulma CSS framework
- Great documentation with examples
- Responsive across devices
- Supports Vue 2 and Vue 3
All Buefy components are fully customizable using props and slots API. While less feature-rich than Vuetify or Quasar, the library focuses on providing popular building blocks and keeping bundle sizes small. The documentation offers interactive examples for all components along with detailed props API and guidelines.
Vant
Vant is a popular lightweight mobile UI component library for Vue. It offers over 60 customizable components tailor-made for mobile web applications.
Key features:
- Lightweight mobile component library
- 60+ responsive mobile UI components
- Customize colors, typography, and shapes
- Less variables for theming
- Components optimized for mobile
- Well-documented code examples
- Great for mobile web apps
All components are optimized for performance on mobile devices. It uses dynamic import to lazy load components, improving initial loading time.
With over 700k downloads per month, Vant is designed from the ground up for mobile web interfaces. While less feature-rich than desktop-focused libraries, it works great for mobile use cases.
Element Plus
Element Plus is a Vue 3 optimized version of the popular Element library for Vue 2. It contains over 65 customizable components designed for desktop interfaces.
Key features:
- Vue 3-based component library
- 65+ responsive components
- Customizable Material Design style
- Flexbox-based page layout
- Detailed documentation
- Well-tested codebase
- Locale based components
Element Plus provides all standard components like buttons, menus, toolbars, pages, and popups required to scaffold admin panels and dashboards. Components come with rich theming options using fewer variables and mixins.
It is currently in beta release but positions itself to be the leading Vue 3 compatible component library in the future.
Ant Design Vue
As Vue implements an Ant Design system, this component library offers dozens of components with customizable UI styles.
Key features:
- Over 60 components using the Ant Design system
- Both Vue 2 and 3 support
- Customize themes with Less
- Standard templates for enterprise apps
- Excellent documentation
- Very popular in China
It offers components in 8 categories like General, Layout, Navigation, Data Entry etc. At the same time, the style reflects Ant Design conventions optimized for enterprise applications. Documentation offers rich examples and API docs for all components and open source on GitHub.
CoreUI Vue
CoreUI offers over 50 responsive and customizable components for admin panels and dashboards.
Key features:
- Specialized for admin dashboard UI
- 50+ components
- Customizable Bootstrap styling
- Detailed documentation
- Both free and paid versions
It saves a lot of design time with ready templates for admin panels, pages, forms, and tables that work smoothly with Core UI components. Paid versions unlock more templates and plugins.
Vuesax
Vuesax is another customizable component library for Vue with over 60 responsive components.
Key features:
- 60+ reactive UI components
- Customize styling with CSS/SCSS
- Sample pages and templates
- Detailed documentation with examples
- Integrates well with other frameworks
The components and layouts provided offer rich customization options for all UI needs. Dedicated docs for Vue Press and Nuxt integrations help you use Vue sax seamlessly in different Vue ecosystems.
iView
iView is a popular UI toolkit offering dozens of quality components for Vue. Some key highlights:
- High-quality UI library
- Over 80 responsive components
- Detailed API documentation
- Custom themes using LESS
- Great for admin interfaces
- Downloads over 900k/month
It offers components in different categories like Layout, Navigation, Input, Display, etc., covering the most common component needs. Every component documents usage and API thoroughly with live examples. The high quality and detailed nature of components and docs make this an excellent choice for complex interfaces.
PrimeVue
PrimeVue is another Vue UI component library for enterprise applications, providing over 90 components.
- Provides over 60 customizable UI components optimized for Vue 2 and 3
- Components can be styled easily with CSS/SCSS variables
- Comes with sample pages and templates for common UI needs
- Good documentation with live examples for all components
- Integrates smoothly with VuePress, Nuxt, and Gridsome
- Ideal for building customizable and responsive web interfaces
Moreover, it is like a toolbox for making excellent and advanced Vue applications. It comes with many different parts, such as tables and paginators, and even well-designed graph-based organization charts. You can use all these parts to make your Vue apps more interesting and interactive.
Keen UI
Keen UI is a popular Vue framework that follows Material Design rules. It doesn’t come with ready-made styles but offers well-coded interactive parts, saving you from writing extra JavaScript. You can easily mix it with your current style or use an open-source CSS framework.
Key features:
- A lightweight component suite containing 20+ UI components
- Material design styled-components for a great look
- Highly customizable using fewer variables
- A clean codebase that is easy to understand
- Actively maintained by a core team
Mint UI
Mint UI is like a toolbox for making mobile apps with Vue. It has ready-made styles for pages and things you see in mobile apps. It helps developers create mobile-like designs using Vue.
Key features:
- Mobile-first UI library with dozens of components
- Components optimized for mobile interfaces
- Offers icons, action sheets, popups, etc.
- Easy to customize using LESS
- Great documentation with examples
- 15K stars on GitHub, indicating popularity
People like Mint UI, and it’s downloaded more than 3,500 times every week from NPM. On GitHub, it has 16,000 stars!
VueTailwind
VueTailwind is a new and growing tool for the front part of websites. It relies on the well-known Tailwind CSS framework.
Key features:
- Provides Vue components styled using Tailwind CSS framework
- Highly customizable using Tailwind’s utility classes
- Contains 30+ UI components for web interfaces
- Lightweight bundle with tree-shakable imports
- Integrates workflows of Tailwind and Vue
It’s still under development, so it might not be the best choice for big, serious projects. However, if you’re working on a smaller Vue project and want to use Tailwind, Vue Tailwind could still be helpful.
Conclusion
Vue’s component ecosystem provides diverse Vue.js UI component libraries like Vuesax, Vue Material, and Vant for specific use cases. Offering customization and themes enhances developer productivity. Specialized libraries save design time, and Vue’s modular nature allows optimized component importing. As Vue grows, its ecosystem will continue to improve front-end development.
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