Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Chakra UI VS styled-components

Compare Chakra UI VS styled-components and see what are their differences

Chakra UI logo Chakra UI

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

styled-components logo styled-components

styled-components is a visual primitive for the component age that also helps the user to use the ES6 and CSS to style apps.
  • Chakra UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-08-13
  • styled-components Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-27

Chakra UI features and specs

  • Component Library
    Chakra UI provides a rich set of customizable and accessible components out of the box, which significantly speeds up the development process.
  • Theming
    Chakra UI offers a powerful theming and styling system. It allows developers to easily define and manage theme properties, leading to consistent design throughout the application.
  • Accessibility
    Components in Chakra UI are built with accessibility in mind. They come with built-in ARIA roles and keyboard navigation support, which makes it easier to build accessible applications.
  • Responsive Design
    Chakra UI facilitates responsive design through its style props and advanced responsive utilities, allowing for seamless adjustments across different screen sizes.
  • Ease of Use
    The API is intuitive and designed with simplicity in mind, making it user-friendly and easy to learn, even for developers who are new to UI frameworks.
  • Community and Documentation
    Chakra UI has an active community and comprehensive documentation, providing ample resources for troubleshooting and learning.

Possible disadvantages of Chakra UI

  • Bundle Size
    The library can add considerable size to your bundle, especially when using a large number of its components and utilities, which might affect performance.
  • Customization Limitations
    While Chakra UI is quite flexible, there might be some limitations when trying to implement highly specific or complex design requirements.
  • Learning Curve for Advanced Features
    Although basics are easy to grasp, mastering the more advanced features and customization options may require a deeper understanding and more time investment.
  • Dependency on Emotion
    Chakra UI relies on emotion.js for its styling engine, which means it brings in an additional dependency and could complicate using other styling solutions concurrently.
  • Potential Overhead
    Using a component library like Chakra UI could introduce overhead in projects where performance is highly critical or where only a small number of components is needed.

styled-components features and specs

  • Component-Scoped Styling
    Styles are encapsulated within components, ensuring that styles do not leak or conflict with other parts of the application.
  • Dynamic Styling
    Enables dynamic styling with the help of JavaScript variables and props, allowing for highly customizable components.
  • CSS Syntax
    Allows developers to write actual CSS code within JavaScript, making it easier for those familiar with CSS to adapt.
  • Automatic Vendor Prefixing
    Automatically adds vendor prefixes to CSS properties, ensuring cross-browser compatibility without additional configuration.
  • Theming Support
    Provides a built-in theming solution, making it easier to implement and switch between different themes in the application.
  • Server-Side Rendering
    Supports server-side rendering, improving initial page load times and SEO.

Possible disadvantages of styled-components

  • Bundle Size
    Styled-components can add to the overall bundle size, potentially affecting performance, especially in large projects.
  • Learning Curve
    Requires developers to learn the styled-components library and its API, which can be a hurdle for new team members or those unfamiliar with CSS-in-JS.
  • Performance Overhead
    The runtime cost of parsing and injecting styles can impact performance, particularly in larger applications or with frequent style changes.
  • Tooling and Ecosystem
    While improving, the ecosystem around styled-components (e.g., linting, debugging) is not as mature as traditional CSS or CSS preprocessor tools.
  • CSS-in-JS Limitations
    Some CSS features, like advanced selectors or cascading, may be more cumbersome or less intuitive to implement compared to traditional CSS approaches.

Chakra UI videos

React Forms Using Chakra UI - React Tutorial - Learn React in 2020 - React Component Library

styled-components videos

No styled-components videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Chakra UI and styled-components)
Design Tools
76 76%
24% 24
Developer Tools
66 66%
34% 34
Development Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Javascript UI Libraries
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Chakra UI and styled-components. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Chakra UI and styled-components

Chakra UI Reviews

10 Best Free React UI Libraries in 2023
Chakra UI is another popular UI component library often used by React developers to design components. Similar to the previous two libraries, it is also an open-source project.
11 Best Material UI Alternatives
Chakra UI provides pre-designed components and utility functions, allowing developers to create visually appealing and responsive websites. Developers can leverage Chakra UI’s customizable and reusable components, such as buttons, forms, cards, and navigation elements, to design intuitive and accessible user interfaces.
Source: www.uxpin.com
React UI Components Libraries: Our Top Picks for 2023
Faster development: Instead of creating the code for every component, you can use a React UI component library such as MUI, Chakra UI, React Bootstrap, etc. They will expose you to multiple, ready to use components suitable for your design. This way, you can save time and develop software faster.
Source: kinsta.com
Top React component libraries (2021 edition)
Theming — At the core of Chakra UI is a default theme to define color palette, type scale, font stacks, breakpoints, border-radius values for an application. Customized themes can then be layered on top of the default theme. Chakra UI also offers a framework to customize components using modifier styles that alter components based on specified properties or state.
Source: retool.com

styled-components Reviews

We have no reviews of styled-components yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Chakra UI might be a bit more popular than styled-components. We know about 201 links to it since March 2021 and only 169 links to styled-components. 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.

Chakra UI mentions (201)

  • 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
  • How I Built JMServices: Challenges, Strengths, and Lessons from My SaaS Journey
    Now, let’s dive back into some technical details. After reaching version 3, we made a significant decision to transition our entire codebase from TailwindCSS to a new design system called Chakra UI. This shift not only enhanced our design consistency but also improved the overall user experience with its modular and accessible components. Chakra UI allowed us to create a more cohesive and visually appealing... - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • 30+ CSS libraries and frameworks help you style your applications efficiently.
    Chakra UI Chakra UI is a modular and accessible component library for React. It offers a range of customizable and composable components, designed to make it easy to build accessible web applications. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Ant Design – the second most popular React UI framework
    I've always been afraid to use Ant because it's Chinese: https://github.com/ant-design), and Chakra is Nigerian (https://v2.chakra-ui.com/) It saddens me that this matters in this an age, but if you're adopting a UI kit for long-term corporate usage, it is worth considering... - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • How I built a Markdown Rendered Blog using Supabase and Chakra UI
    Supabase will be used for storing article data in the database and the cover image of the article in storage. Chakra UI will be used to provide style to the elements. By using both, we can build the blog with ease. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
View more

styled-components mentions (169)

  • 11 Interview Questions You Should Know as a React Native Developer in 2025 📈🚀
    Using the same CSS-in-JS approach as React, you can use libraries like Styled Components to style your components. This allows you to write CSS directly in your JavaScript files (personally not a fan of using these). - Source: dev.to / 26 days ago
  • CSS-in-JS: Pros and cons
    The 2016 release of styled-components popularized the approach, offering a clean syntax and React integration. - Source: dev.to / 27 days ago
  • Woovi monorepos best practices
    This detail implies if any dependencies can be resolved correctly and if not have a version conflict. As the example we have the styled-components lib, it can have a problem with type Symbol reference where the library doesn´t find your properties of themes because, in your internal code, it uses the symbolObject which is a unique object that refers your set configs. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Top 20 Modern React Libraries To Supercharge Your Next Big Project
    Resource: Styled Components Documentation. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • How to Use Styled-Components for Elegant React UI Design
    Styled-Components is a library that allows you to write CSS directly within your JavaScript files (CSS-in-JS), ensuring that your styles are scoped to individual components. Rather than managing separate CSS files, you define your styles alongside your component logic. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Chakra UI and styled-components, you can also consider the following products

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

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

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

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.

Sass - Syntatically Awesome Style Sheets

Next.js - A small framework for server-rendered universal JavaScript apps