In the React ecosystem, speed, scalability, and flexibility are everything. The right UI library can amplify what React does best: streamline development, optimize performance, and create seamless user experiences. But with a sea of choice, how do you find the one that best fits your needs?
In this comparison of React UI component libraries, we’ll review five top contenders: Wijmo, NextUI, MUI, DHTMLX for React, and Kendo UI for React. Each one brings something unique to the table, from top-notch performance and flexibility to customization and strong support. By the end, you’ll have a clearer idea of which of these libraries suits your development needs.
Wijmo from MESCIUS offers a robust collection of UI components supporting React, Angular, and Vue. With Wijmo’s TypeScript foundation, you’ll benefit from more than just faster performance. The seamless transition to React includes full IntelliSense support, design-time error checking, and modern ES6 features like true object orientation with the powerful CollectionView class. This not only improves development speed but also reduces errors, making it easier to build complex applications with confidence.
Key Components Include:
- FlexGrid: A powerful data grid with advanced features like in-line editing, hierarchical data support, virtual scrolling, and custom cell rendering.
- FlexChart: Over 80 customizable chart types, including bar, line, radar, bubble, financial, and combination charts. Offers flexible data binding, zooming, hit testing, and customizable axes.
- OLAP PivotGrid: Drill into data without needing server-side dependencies. It’s equipped with slicing and dicing tools, making it ideal for large datasets and business intelligence applications.
- FlexMap: A robust map visualization tool with customizable geospatial data rendering options such as bubble maps, scatter maps, and choropleth maps.
- Input Controls: A complete set of input components, including AutoComplete, Listbox, DatePicker, ComboBox, and MaskedInput. Comes with advanced features like flexible data binding, min/max ranges, time intervals, and customizable pop-ups.
- MultiRow & TransposedGrid: Special grids useful for displaying complex datasets in compact formats.
- Gauges: A responsive and touch-enabled gauge component with built-in support for linear, radial, and bullet graphs. Features include ranges, labels, shadow effects, and animation.
With zero dependencies and a modular design, Wijmo lets you cherry-pick the components you need, keeping your overall application size small. This framework-agnostic approach makes Wijmo a lean choice for building fast, scalable, and responsive React applications.
Wijmo is built with an extensibility model that allows you to customize every component or create new components from scratch. This level of flexibility is invaluable when off-the-shelf solutions don’t meet specific requirements. You can easily tailor components to fit the most demanding use cases, helping you deliver exactly what your application or users need without compromise.
Customer Support and Licensing
With Wijmo, you’re not just choosing a UI library; you’re gaining a partner in your development process. The rich documentation and highly responsive Platinum support (including email, phone, and online resources) mean you aren’t left on your own when challenges arise.
At just $799 per developer, Wijmo offers flexible licensing options that fit both small startups and established enterprises. You receive enterprise-grade tools without the unnecessary overhead, making it a smart investment for teams that need performance, flexibility, and top-tier support.
NextUI is a modern, sleek UI library designed to offer a minimalistic approach to building React applications. Its design philosophy focuses on simplicity, and the suite provides a polished experience right out of the box.
Components Include:
- Button: A fully customizable button component with a variety of sizes, styles, and themes. Perfect for clean, modern UIs, with built-in animations and hover effects for interactive user experiences.
- Modal: A versatile and responsive modal component that supports dynamic content and complex interactions, making it ideal for forms, pop-ups, or any type of user engagement.
- Grid: A flexible and responsive grid system designed to handle adaptable layouts across different screen sizes. It supports custom breakpoints for precise layout control.
- Card: A stylish card component designed to organize content in a visually appealing way. Its simplicity and flexibility make it ideal for showcasing products, articles, or user information.
- Dark Mode: NextUI features automatic dark mode support, allowing seamless theme switching between light and dark modes without additional configuration.
The Tailwind-based architecture allows for effortless theme customization so that you can align your application’s aesthetic with any branding needs. Developers can even create entirely new themes or modify existing ones using the TailwindCSS plugin, offering maximum control over the design without any performance trade-offs. NextUI is a versatile tool for both small projects and complex, design-heavy applications.
Customer Support and Licensing
As an open-source project, NextUI is free to use and benefits from a growing community of developers. The library is actively maintained, with regular updates and a dedicated community available through GitHub, Discord, and Twitter.
MUI is one of the most popular UI libraries for React, built around Google’s Material Design. It provides an extensive range of pre-built components that integrate with the Material Design system, making it a suitable choice for teams already familiar with these guidelines. With MUI, developers can build fast, eye-catching, and fully responsive web applications.
Core Components Include:
- DataGrid Pro: A feature-rich data grid that offers sorting, filtering, pagination, and in-line editing. It also supports export options to CSV, Excel, and PDF, customizable themes, and deep integration with MUI’s styling system.
- Button: A versatile button component with multiple variants (text, outlined, contained) and customization options for colors, icons, and animations.
- Dialog: A dynamic modal component for pop-ups and user interactions, with full control over layout, transitions, and actions. Ideal for building forms, confirmations, and much more.
- Autocomplete: A powerful search and suggestion component that filters data as users type, providing async data loading, custom filters, and full keyboard and mouse control.
- Typography: A flexible typography system that allows you to easily manage fonts, sizes, and text alignment to create a cohesive and professional appearance.
- Chips: Compact elements that represent an attribute, selection, or action, customizable in style and behavior, perfect for tags, filters, or status indicators in your application.
MUI’s powerful theming system enables developers to customize every aspect of their app’s design, from colors and typography to shadows and spacing. Whether you’re using Google’s Material Design or creating your own theme, MUI provides flexibility and control over the look and feel of your application.
Components like DataGrid Pro leverage virtualization and lazy loading to keep things running smoothly, even with massive datasets. Plus, MUI’s modular approach means you only load what you need, trimming down bundle sizes and keeping your app fast and responsive.
Customer Support and Licensing
MUI is free and open source, supported by an active community and extensive documentation. For more advanced use cases, MUI X offers premium components like DataGrid Pro, advanced date and time pickers, and enterprise-level support.
DHTMLX for React focuses on delivering high-performance UI components for complex data-driven applications. With a range of tools designed for heavy data manipulation and scheduling, DHTMLX is a powerful solution for enterprise applications.
Key Components Include:
- Grid: Designed for enterprise-level applications that need to process large datasets. It offers advanced features like sorting, multi-level filtering, in-line editing, and customizable cell rendering.
- Calendar: A flexible calendar component for scheduling and managing events. It supports drag-and-drop, recurring events, and multiple views, making it ideal for time-sensitive tasks or project planning.
- Tree: Combines the best grids and trees to display hierarchical data with advanced editing and sorting options. Great for managing nested data structures.
- Form: A form builder with support for validation, file uploads, and dynamic fields.
- Layout: This tool allows you to divide your app into resizable panels, making it perfect for creating flexible, multi-view interfaces like dashboards or admin panels.
- Gantt: A must-have for visualizing tasks and deadlines in an interactive timeline. Dependency tracking and critical path analysis help keep projects on track.
DHTMLX features virtual scrolling in the grid and smooth integration with REST APIs, making it ideal for handling large datasets without slowing down. While DHTMLX offers some customization options, especially for themes and styling through CSS, it’s not as flexible as other libraries like MUI or Wijmo.
You can adjust many visual aspects, but more complex changes, such as modifying component behavior or deeply altering layouts, will require more effort on your part.
Customer Support and Licensing
DHTMLX is geared towards enterprise users, with commercial licenses starting at $1699. A 30-day free trial is available and provides access to the full suite of components and support. The documentation is comprehensive, and support options include a dedicated team ready to help with integration or fine-tuning components.
KendoUI for React is a comprehensive UI library offering over 100 components built natively for React. It’s packed with features for handling complex data, forms, and visualizations. With built-in support for React Server Components and a focus on accessibility, Kendo UI is about delivering seamless, scalable solutions for demanding business environments.
Components Include:
- Grid: A versatile data grid that supports in-line editing, filtering, grouping, sorting, and data export to Excel, PDF, or CSV. With virtual scrolling and server-side processing, it easily handles large datasets without slowing down.
- Charts: A flexible charting library with popular options, like Line, Pie, Bar, and Scatter, plus advanced types like Funnel and Heatmaps.
- Scheduler: A feature-rich scheduling component that integrates well with business workflows. It supports recurring events and multiple calendar views.
- Rich Text Editor: A WYSIWYG editor that makes content creation easy. It supports rich text formatting, media embedding, and custom templates, making it ideal for interactive text areas.
- Conversational UI: A customizable chat interface that supports AI-powered chatbots, making it a useful tool for customer support or real-time user interaction.
- TaskBoard: A drag-and-drop task management component designed to visualize and manage workflows in a Kanban-style board.
Customization is a breeze with ThemeBuilder and Figma Kits, which make it easy to adapt Kendo UI components to your brand without diving into CSS. Kendo UI also keeps pace with the latest accessibility standards, like WCAG 2.2 and WAI-ARIA, while features like virtual scrolling and server-side data handling mean that no matter how big your data gets, your app stays light on its feet.
Customer Support and Licensing
Kendo UI for React is priced at $1,149 per developer, offering access to premium features and top-tier support directly from the engineers who build the tools. A 30-day free trial with technical support is also available, making it easy to explore everything Kendo has to offer before committing.
Conclusion
Each of these UI libraries brings something unique to the table—NextUI is all about simplicity and sleek design, while MUI fits perfectly for those who lean on Material Design. DHTMLX and Kendo UI are tailored for enterprise applications, offering robust tools for handling complex data and scheduling.
But when it comes to a well-rounded solution, Wijmo is an obvious choice, offering the best of both worlds. Its modular design and zero dependencies mean you only use what you need, keeping your app lightweight and efficient. With its powerful extensibility, you’re in control, so you can customize or build exactly what your project requires. Wijmo from MESCIUS is, hands down, the best choice for lean, data-heavy projects.
