React Libraries You’ll Want to Check Out for Your Next Project
By: Kevin Sheehan
Tags: React, Data Visualization, Programming, JavaScript, Web Development

As someone looking to create beautiful, responsive, web applications with react it can be a little daunting trying to decide what libraries to pick when you are planning out your project. There are so many & picking out the libraries that best fit your project idea can be pretty difficult. This is why I decided to create a list of react libraries that are worth checking out.

Libraries For Styling

Styling libraries can save hours of time for developers who are not worried about having completely custom components on their site. In fact even for developers that do want custom components, many libraries (including all the libraries I have in this list) provide a lot of options for customizing their components.

This library provides a ton of styling choices & themes that developers can choose from to help build beautiful applications. The library’s main features are its themes. Themes allow the developer to easily specify the color of the components, darkness of the surfaces, level of shadow, appropriate opacity of ink elements, etc. They offer plenty of free themes however have an even larger supply of themes available for purchase. Material UI’s documentation makes it very easy to implement into your react app because they give very clear examples using react hooks on how to use the library on your app.

2. AntDesign:

Much like material-ui, ant design provides stylized react components that allow you to customize the components to your liking. The library’s documentation provides categories of components that you can add to your project. The documentation is very easy to understand & is organized in a way for you to easily find the components you would like to use in your project. Ant has less options available than material-ui does however, there are some benefits. All components on AntDesign are free & they provide instructions on how to use these third party libraries that you may need in your application.

3. Tailwind-UI:

Tailwind UI is a bit different than other styling libraries in a couple of ways. The first difference is in how they make many of their components. Many of the components on tailwind are designed for specific large scale uses, for instance they have specific components built out for entire pricing sections on a web page or a blog sections on a web page. This is different than other libraries because most other libraries focus on smaller scale, more customizable components like a card component that you can use for what you want. Having large scale components that can be used for entire pages is nice because not only does it save the developer time but Tailwind makes sure that these larger components are beautifully put together. The downside to this is that you will need to customize your own smaller components, however tailwind does also provide some smaller components.

Libraries For DataCharts

I believe all react developers who want to work with data visualization often should have a basic understanding of D3, however there are many libraries that can do a lot of the work for you & save you a lot of time trying to understand what is happening on a low level with data charts. It’s worth noting that having a strong understanding for D3 will give you the best options for data visualization & the libraries in this list will not be as powerful as D3, but will provide an easier to understand options.

Nivo provides hundreds of data visuals with customization options. This is a great option that allows developers to create beautiful charts to represent their data. On top of this nivo is known to render its visuals much faster than other data visual libraries. However, in terms of popularity, Nivo is actually quite low compared to other libraries in terms of downloads. This could be due to a lot of factors but the most obvious reason is that, like D3, there is a large learning curve involved with using this library. But when you look at reviews for developers who have used nivo, it is one of the highest rated because of its customization and fantastic visuals.

2. Victory:

Much like Nivo, victory provides robust, flexible charts. Victory is much more popular than Nivo & provides many of the same services with easier to understand documentation. This is a great option to provide great data visuals with a bit smaller of a learning curve.

3. Recharts:

Lastly, we have Recharts. Recharts is one of the most popular data visualization libraries for react & is vastly more popular than both Nivo & Victory. It provides well put together charts that are also fairly easy to understand & implement. This is a phenomenal library to use if you want easy to understand documentation & fewer issues trying to get the charts working the way you intend. The biggest downsides to recharts are obviously the customization & performance. While the learning curve is much lower, it is not as powerful or customizable as Nivo or Victory.