Software Alternatives & Reviews

Backlight VS Pattern Lab

Compare Backlight VS Pattern Lab and see what are their differences

Backlight logo Backlight

Backlight is a unique collaborative platform to build Design Systems code-side.📐 Design tokens🧩 Component code and stories📖 Documentation site📦 Managed release to npmEverything in one place, in a true collaborative workspace.Try 👉 backlight.dev

Pattern Lab logo Pattern Lab

Create atomic design systems with Pattern Lab.
  • Backlight Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-12-15
  • Pattern Lab Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-20

Backlight videos

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Pattern Lab videos

Introduction to Pattern Lab

More videos:

  • Review - Using Pattern Lab to Design More Efficiently

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Backlight and Pattern Lab)
Design Tools
52 52%
48% 48
Developer Tools
47 47%
53% 53
Productivity
100 100%
0% 0
React
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Backlight and Pattern Lab. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Pattern Lab might be a bit more popular than Backlight. We know about 6 links to it since March 2021 and only 6 links to Backlight. 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.

Backlight mentions (6)

  • Show HN: Mirrorful – A developer-first way to implement designs faster
    Interesting. Two questions 1. How does this compare/relate to https://backlight.dev/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Tools for design system documentation
    You could look at backlight.dev by divriots. Source: over 1 year ago
  • kickstartDS is Open Source now. Let’s start to democratize Design Systems today
    Today quite some companies are already tackling similar problems. Talking of Knapsack.cloud, Backlight.dev, Specify, Supernova and many more, here. They all deliver value to simplify workflows for setup, integration, documentation and management of Design Systems. This is all super helpful in spreading the love about Design Systems to teams out there, and is a huge benefit to the process side of things. But you... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • free-for.dev
    Backlight — With collaboration between developers and designers at heart, Backlight is a very complete coding platform where teams build, document, publish, scale and maintain Design Systems.Free plan allows up to 3 editors working on 1 design system with unlimited viewers. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Vite in the browser
    Our products: Backlight.dev, Components.studio and WebComponents.dev, are running a server-side bundler optimizer for the past 2 years now. We created a Vite plugin for browser-vite to resolve node dependencies automatically. As of the date of this post, this server-side bundler is not open-sourced. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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Pattern Lab mentions (6)

  • Unlocking the frontend – a call for standardizing component APIs pt.2
    While this helped ease integration work, in parallel to that we also started exploring more systematic approaches on the frontend side itself. With the advent of Brad Frost Atomic Design, and tools like Pattern Lab, we started using a more component-centric approach. This included colocating all styling (CSS), behavior (JavaScript) and semantic structure (HTML) for a component, and way better encapsulation as a... - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Atomic Design: A Methodology for Building Design Systems
    In order to apply this methodology in your work, you can use a tool called Pattern Lab, created by Brad Frost and Dave Olsen. Pattern Lab is a tool to create atomic design systems. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Integrating Accessibility In The Web Development Process
    Something that would really help to work with tested components and stay consistent with the code and guarantee code quality would be a component library created with Storybook or Pattern Lab, for example. Developers who have a high level of knowledge of how to write accessible code can create components and test them before implementing them. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • How do you make the styling of the site flexible to fast change, but not tedious to actually go in and change every single detail?
    You can read more about Atomic Design Systems and how it scales. I've used Patternlab and I find it awesome. Source: over 2 years ago
  • fractal.build as an atomic design tool
    Fractal seemed easier, at least to me, to understand and maintain, than PatternLab, which I failed to install due a bug in the current installer (and when I managed to install the grunt version, I was already told that there is fractal as a possible alternative). - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Backlight and Pattern Lab, you can also consider the following products

InVision Design System Manager - Create and maintain your design system at scale.

Storybook - Storybook is an open source tool for developing UI components in isolation for React, Vue, and Angular. It makes building stunning UIs organized and efficient.

Toolabs DSM - Design System Manager plugin for creating themeable designs

Fractal Docs - Powerful component libraries & styleguides that fit the way you work.

Eva Design System - A free customizable design system

Swanky Docs - A simple, flexible and powerful ecosystem for creating beautiful documentation.