Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

CSS Modules VS Chakra UI

Compare CSS Modules VS Chakra UI and see what are their differences

CSS Modules logo CSS Modules

Iโ€™ve been intrigued by CSS Modules lately. If you haven't heard of them, this post is for you. We'll be looking at the project and it's goals and aims. If

Chakra UI logo Chakra UI

Simple, modular and accessible UI components for your React applications.
  • CSS Modules Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-21
  • Chakra UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-08-13

CSS Modules features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

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.

Analysis of Chakra UI

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Chakra UI (v2.chakra-ui.com) is considered good.

Why this product is good

  • Chakra UI offers a set of modular and accessible components that significantly simplify the process of building a modern React application with a clean and consistent design.
  • It emphasizes accessibility, ensuring that applications built with Chakra UI are usable by as many people as possible.
  • Chakra UI is highly customizable, allowing developers to easily adjust the design system to meet the specific needs of their projects.
  • The documentation is comprehensive and well-organized, which makes it easy for developers to understand and implement the components.
  • The community around Chakra UI is active, and the library is frequently updated, reflecting a well-maintained project.

Recommended for

  • Developers who are building React applications and desire a library that provides a great balance between flexibility and ease of use.
  • Teams looking for a library that ensures accessibility and adheres to best practices in web development.
  • Projects that require a consistent design system with the ability to easily customize or override styles to fit specific branding needs.
  • Developers new to React who would benefit from an intuitive, component-driven approach to building UIs.

CSS Modules videos

Josh Johnston: At Least 6 Ways to Win with CSS Modules

More videos:

  • Review - Styling React Components with CSS Modules | Styling react with CSS Classes | Data Is Good
  • Review - Styling LitElement views part 2: global styles and CSS modules (Vaadin Fusion)

Chakra UI videos

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to CSS Modules and Chakra UI)
CSS Framework
100 100%
0% 0
Design Tools
4 4%
96% 96
Developer Tools
6 6%
94% 94
UI
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

CSS Modules Reviews

We have no reviews of CSS Modules yet.
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Chakra UI Reviews

The Best Component Libraries for React, Next.js & Tailwind UI
A: Many high-quality component libraries are open-source and free to use, such as Material UI and Chakra UI. Some libraries offer premium components or themes for a fee, but the free versions are often sufficient for many projects.
Source: gist.github.com
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 UIโ€™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 โ€” 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

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Chakra UI seems to be a lot more popular than CSS Modules. While we know about 201 links to Chakra UI, we've tracked only 13 mentions of CSS Modules. 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.

CSS Modules mentions (13)

  • Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS
    When I say css modules I mean something more akin to https://css-tricks.com/css-modules-part-1-need/. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • On why I prefer not to use elm-css
    ..., CSS Modules, CSS-in-JS, and Tailwind when I'm not constrained to do so. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Is there really no better way to isolate styles across components than CSS modules?
    From what I read about CSS modules, the style isolation provides some guard rails to prevent things like random bits of global style or having colliding rules all over the place. This makes a lot of sense, but even on huge projects, I never really have those problems. I've disciplined myself to pair a component file with a CSS file (MyComponent.jsx + MyComponent.css) and keep global styles to a minimum. Source: over 3 years ago
  • Components with separate styles - how to do?
    Any time you import CSS files into a module, that CSS becomes active on EVERY component in your entire project, so that's not really a good way to go about it. It essentially creates a tag inside the final rendered html with all of your CSS within it. If you have two CSS files, and they both have a class of .myClass then they will step on each other and cause bad things to happen to your... Source: over 3 years ago
  • Why do bigger websites have the weirdest class and id names?
    They are probably using css modules. Source: over 3 years ago
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Chakra UI mentions (201)

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What are some alternatives?

When comparing CSS Modules and Chakra UI, you can also consider the following products

Sass - Syntatically Awesome Style Sheets

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

PostCSS - Increase code readability. Add vendor prefixes to CSS rules using values from Can I Use. Autoprefixer will use the data based on current browser popularity and property support to apply prefixes for you.

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

Less - Less extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. Less runs on both the server-side (with Node. js and Rhino) or client-side (modern browsers only).

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