Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Ant Design VS Element UI

Compare Ant Design VS Element UI and see what are their differences

Ant Design logo Ant Design

An enterprise-class UI design language and React implementation with a set of high-quality React components, one of best React UI library for enterprises

Element UI logo Element UI

A Desktop UI Library. Element, a Vue 2.0 based component library for developers, designers and product managers.
  • Ant Design Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-17
  • Element UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-29

Ant Design features and specs

  • Comprehensive Component Library
    Ant Design offers a rich set of customizable UI components that follow modern design principles, making it easier to build visually appealing and consistent user interfaces.
  • Design System
    It comes with a robust design system that provides guidelines and best practices for developing user interfaces, ensuring coherence and efficiency in design.
  • Responsive and Adaptive
    Ant Design's components are designed to be responsive, ensuring that applications look good on various screen sizes and devices.
  • Internationalization Support
    Built-in support for internationalization allows developers to easily localize their applications for different languages and regions.
  • Extensive Documentation
    Ant Design provides comprehensive documentation, examples, and tutorials to help developers quickly get started and effectively use the library.
  • Active Community and Support
    It has an active community and regular updates, which means continuous improvements, bug fixes, and support.

Possible disadvantages of Ant Design

  • Large Bundle Size
    Ant Design can contribute to a larger bundle size, which may impact performance, particularly in low-bandwidth environments.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    The extensive features and components can be overwhelming for beginners, requiring time to learn and adapt to the framework.
  • Opinionated Styling
    Ant Design follows specific design guidelines, which may not align with all projects’ design requirements or preferences, limiting customization options.
  • Dependency on Less
    It relies heavily on Less for styling, which may be a drawback for teams who prefer or are more proficient in other CSS pre-processors like Sass or plain CSS.
  • Limited Flexibility with Custom Themes
    While customization is possible, creating a custom theme can be complex and time-consuming compared to other UI frameworks.
  • Compatibility Issues
    Occasional compatibility issues may arise, especially when integrating with other libraries or tools that haven’t been designed to work with Ant Design.

Element UI features and specs

  • Comprehensive Component Library
    Element UI offers a wide range of well-designed components that cover most use cases, making it easier to develop complex interfaces.
  • Consistency
    The UI components maintain a consistent look and feel throughout the application, providing a professional and unified user experience.
  • Customization
    Element UI is highly customizable, allowing developers to easily modify the appearance and behavior of components to match their design requirements.
  • Documentation
    The library comes with comprehensive documentation, which includes examples and detailed guides to help developers quickly get up to speed.
  • Active Community
    It has an active community and regular updates, which means that any issues are quickly addressed, and new features are frequently added.
  • Integration with Vue.js
    Element UI is specifically designed for Vue.js, providing seamless integration and making it a go-to choice for Vue developers.

Possible disadvantages of Element UI

  • Bundle Size
    The complete library can be quite large, which may impact the performance and loading times of your application if not handled properly.
  • Limited to Vue.js
    Element UI is built specifically for Vue.js and is not easily compatible with other JavaScript frameworks, limiting its versatility.
  • Customizability Limitations
    While it is possible to customize the components, doing so can sometimes be complex and may require deep knowledge of the library and Vue.js.
  • Learning Curve
    For developers who are not familiar with Vue.js, there is a learning curve associated with both the framework and the Element UI components.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing dependencies and ensuring compatibility between different versions of Vue.js and Element UI can be challenging.
  • Scoped Stylings
    The styling of components may sometimes conflict with the scoped styles in your application, requiring additional adjustments.

Ant Design videos

Setup Ant Design - Tutorial to Install Ant Design library / Antd with Create React App

More videos:

  • Review - Coding React Form with Formik and Ant Design - Part 3

Element UI videos

Vue.js Element UI Component Library | Demo & Review

More videos:

  • Review - Element UI Vue Introduction (Component Framework) On Basics (First Look)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ant Design and Element UI)
Design Tools
85 85%
15% 15
Development Tools
86 86%
14% 14
Developer Tools
87 87%
13% 13
UI
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Ant Design and Element UI

Ant Design Reviews

10 Best Free React UI Libraries in 2023
Ant Design is a UI library that is used to build enterprise-level interfaces for web applications. It has its own design language that is used extensively in the products of Ant Financial.
11 Best Material UI Alternatives
The Ant Design library is a comprehensive UI component library developed by Ant Design that offers a wide range of reusable and well-documented components for building high-quality applications. It follows the principles of the Ant Design system, emphasizing a clean and minimalist design aesthetic with a focus on usability and accessibility.
Source: www.uxpin.com
React UI Components Libraries: Our Top Picks for 2023
Ant Design Pro: AntD’s other variant Ant Design Pro comes with features like templates and a design kit apart from components to help you design your applications.
Source: kinsta.com
Top React component libraries (2021 edition)
AntD offers Ant Design Pro, an out-of-box UI solution for enterprise applications. Ant Design Pro comes equipped with templates, components, and a corresponding design kit.
Source: retool.com
Comparing popular React component libraries
Unlike Ant Design, Material-UI offers built-in methods to style components. makeStyles() is useful, especially when your code starts to get big; it helps you find the element to style more quickly and makes the code more readable. The downside is that readability may degrade as a component grows. But overall, Material-UI is a strong, highly customizable library.

Element UI Reviews

14 Best Vue UI Component Libraries 2023
This library is developed mostly by Chinese contributors and the original documentation was written in Chinese. It’s highly suggested to check out the internationalization guide before starting a project, as the default language of the project is Chinese. Element is a great kit for developing complex desktop UIs by teams of developers, designers, and product managers.
Source: athemes.com
15 of the Most Interesting Vue UI Component Libraries for 2023
Element, too, has significant documentation in Chinese, although Spanish and English translations are provided. Non-native Chinese speakers should go through the internationalization documentation before using Element in their projects.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Ant Design seems to be a lot more popular than Element UI. While we know about 107 links to Ant Design, we've tracked only 2 mentions of Element UI. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Ant Design mentions (107)

  • How to Create a Blog with React and ButterCMS
    One of the key concepts of React is components. Components enable us to break down a user interface (UI) into independent pieces that can be used in different parts of an application. Utilizing components for a blog, the blog postcard, header, footer, custom button, etc., can be created separately and used through the blog application. This can improve productivity by enabling the reuse of said components.... - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • React UI Component Libraries in 2025
    Ant Design's React implementation continues to be a favorite for enterprise applications, with its extensive component set and advanced theming capabilities. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • React libraries for building forms and surveys
    Library Documentation Community Updates Performance-focused Notes SurveyJS Easy to follow and concise Large and growing Updates frequently No [Paid tier](https://surveyjs.io/pricing) for large projects, [part of a form library ecosystem](https://surveyjs.io/try/reactjs) React Hook Form Easy to follow and concise Extremely large and rapidly growing Updates... - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Ask HN: How do I find UI/UX design systems for my app?
    Personally I like https://mui.com/ a lot. There's also https://www.chakra-ui.com/ and https://ant.design/ (but Ant is Chinese, if that matters). I think those are the big 3. There might be directories of smaller ones but I dunno any offhand. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • How to Use Ant Design with Next.js: A Complete Guide
    One of the things each web developer should see is how easy it may be to create user experience as well as visual appeal. Two very powerful tools to assist in this regard are Next.js and Ant Design. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
View more

Element UI mentions (2)

  • Awesome | Top 9 UI Frameworks for Vue.js
    Element is a UI library for building web applications, primarily targeted at desktop applications. It is simple to use and offers a wide variety of components and features. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • How can I make a page look more professional?
    Thanks for the input, I use this library which already has it's own design and margins so I just used the default ones for certain items, I did alter some of the css for other items. I do see how that could make everything square up better and look more consistent. Source: about 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ant Design and Element UI, you can also consider the following products

Material UI - A CSS Framework and a Set of React Components that Implement Google's Material Design

Chakra UI - Simple, modular and accessible UI components for your React applications.

Bootstrap - Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and JS for popular UI components and interactions

Tailwind CSS - A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.

DevExtreme - HTML5 Widgets & SPA Framework for Desktop and Mobile

Materialize CSS - A modern responsive front-end framework based on Material Design