Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

jQuery UI VS React

Compare jQuery UI VS React and see what are their differences

jQuery UI logo jQuery UI

Curated set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library

React logo React

A JavaScript library for building user interfaces
  • jQuery UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-17
  • React Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-19

jQuery UI features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    jQuery UI simplifies creating and managing complex UI components with straightforward syntax and comprehensive documentation.
  • Compatibility
    jQuery UI is highly compatible with older browsers, offering a broader range of support compared to more modern frameworks.
  • Extensibility
    jQuery UI is designed to be modular and extendable, allowing developers to use only the components they need and easily extend or theming them.
  • Rich Set of Widgets
    It comes with a variety of pre-built widgets such as datepickers, accordions, and sliders, which can save development time.
  • Animated Effects
    jQuery UI includes many built-in animation effects that can enhance the user experience without requiring additional libraries.
  • Theming
    The library provides Themeroller, a tool that allows developers to create custom themes easily, ensuring UI consistency and branding.

Possible disadvantages of jQuery UI

  • Performance
    Due to its extensive feature set, jQuery UI can be relatively heavy, which may affect performance, particularly in resource-constrained environments.
  • Not Mobile-First
    jQuery UI is not designed with mobile-first principles in mind, making it less optimal for modern responsive web applications.
  • Learning Curve
    While easy to use for simple tasks, mastering jQuery UI for more complex applications may require a significant learning curve.
  • Dependency on jQuery
    Since jQuery UI relies on the jQuery library, it adds an additional dependency which can be limiting if you prefer or are required to use vanilla JS or another library.
  • Declining Popularity
    With the rise of modern frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular, jQuery UI has seen a decline in popularity and community support.
  • Limited Modern Features
    Compared to contemporary UI libraries, jQuery UI lacks some of the modern features and performance optimizations found in newer libraries.

React features and specs

  • Component-Based Architecture
    React encourages the creation of reusable UI components, which can be leveraged to build complex user interfaces efficiently. This promotes better code organization and separation of concerns.
  • Virtual DOM
    React uses a virtual DOM to optimize and accelerate the process of updating the browser’s DOM, significantly improving application performance.
  • Strong Community and Ecosystem
    React has a large and active community, which means plenty of third-party libraries, tools, and community support are readily available to assist developers.
  • JSX Syntax
    React’s JSX syntax allows developers to write HTML structures within JavaScript code, making the code more readable and easier to debug.
  • Unidirectional Data Flow
    React promotes a unidirectional data flow, which helps maintain the predictability and ease of debugging, especially for larger applications.
  • Extensive Documentation
    React's official documentation is comprehensive, well-organized, and provides numerous examples and tutorials to help developers get started and advance their skills.

Possible disadvantages of React

  • Steep Learning Curve
    React comes with a steep learning curve for beginners, especially those unfamiliar with JavaScript ES6 and JSX syntax.
  • Boilerplate Code
    Setting up a React project often requires boilerplate code, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming compared to simpler frameworks.
  • Fast-Paced Development
    React and its associated libraries evolve rapidly, necessitating frequent updates and learning new patterns, which can be overwhelming for developers.
  • Complexity in Larger Applications
    As a React application grows in size, managing state and props across components can become complex, sometimes necessitating additional state management libraries like Redux or Context API.
  • SEO Challenges
    React, being a JavaScript library, can present challenges for search engine optimization (SEO) due to Googlebot's limitations in executing JavaScript, although this can be mitigated with server-side rendering (SSR) or static site generation (SSG).

Analysis of jQuery UI

Overall verdict

  • jQuery UI is a solid choice for projects that already use jQuery or for developers who need to implement standard UI components quickly and easily. However, for projects starting from scratch, considering more modern alternatives that align with the current state of JavaScript development, such as React, Vue, or Angular, might be beneficial due to their extensive ecosystems and support for modern development patterns.

Why this product is good

  • jQuery UI is a popular library that extends the capabilities of jQuery with a robust set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes. It is particularly well-suited for developers who are already familiar with jQuery and need to implement features quickly without starting from scratch. Its components are widely used because they are both customizable and reliable, and it is backed by a large community that offers support and contributions. Furthermore, jQuery UI simplifies complex interactions and effects that would otherwise require significant effort to code manually, especially for those who seek cross-browser compatibility.

Recommended for

    jQuery UI is recommended for developers working on legacy projects that heavily rely on jQuery, or for quick, short-to-medium-term projects where ease of use and speed of implementation are paramount. It is also suitable for educational purposes, helping beginners understand DOM manipulation and UI interaction concepts. However, for new projects aimed at creating highly interactive and scalable applications, a framework or library that supports modern front-end technologies may be more appropriate.

Analysis of React

Overall verdict

  • React is generally considered a good choice for developing modern web applications. Its performance, large community, extensive ecosystem, and ease of integration with other technologies make it a compelling option for many developers. However, whether it's the best choice depends on the specific requirements and constraints of your project.

Why this product is good

  • React is a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces, particularly single-page applications where a dynamic and responsive interface is essential. It is maintained by Facebook and a community of individual developers and companies. React's component-based architecture allows for reusable and self-contained components, making development more efficient and scalable. Features like the Virtual DOM improve performance by updating only the necessary parts of the UI.

Recommended for

  • Developers looking to build interactive user interfaces
  • Projects requiring fast rendering and dynamic updates
  • Applications that will benefit from component reusability and maintainability
  • Teams interested in leveraging a rich ecosystem and community support
  • Projects intending to use React Native for mobile app development in conjunction

jQuery UI videos

jQuery UI tutorial: Adding a user interface with jQuery UI | lynda.com

More videos:

  • Review - jQuery UI Ultimate:Design Amazing Interfaces Using jQuery UI : Understanding the curriculum.

React videos

What Is React?

More videos:

  • Review - NOT Worth Buying? Nike EPIC REACT FLYKNIT 2 vs Epic React REVIEW
  • Review - NIKE REACT INFINITY RUN FLYKNIT REVIEW | The Ginger Runner

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to jQuery UI and React)
Javascript UI Libraries
14 14%
86% 86
Development Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
4 4%
96% 96
Libraries And Widgets
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 jQuery UI and React

jQuery UI Reviews

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React Reviews

Top JavaScript Frameworks in 2025
ReactJS is a JavaScript based UI development library which is developed by Facebook. It is an open-source framework which is widely used by developers for web development. One of the major reasons why React.JS is widely popular is because it uses Virtual DOM. This enables developers to create web applications faster.
Source: solguruz.com
The 20 Best Laravel Alternatives for Web Development
React’s the cool kid on the block, turning heads since Facebook dropped it at our feet. Building dynamic user interfaces feels less like coding, more like crafting with this JavaScript library.
Top 9 best Frameworks for web development
React uses a virtual DOM to optimize the performance of UI updates and follows a one-way data flow for easy tracking of data changes. With its active community and abundance of third-party resources and libraries, React is a solid choice for web development.
Source: www.kiwop.com
9 Best JavaScript Frameworks to Use in 2023
React can be used as a base in the development of single-page or mobile applications. However, React is concerned with rendering data to the DOM, so creating React apps usually requires additional libraries for state management, routing, and interaction with an API.
Source: ninetailed.io
JavaScript: What Are The Most Used Frameworks For This Language?
Some of its top features include server-side rendering, automatic code splitting, client-side routing, built-in CSS support, static site generation and API routes. Overall, Next.JS is a powerful and flexible framework that provides developers with a simple and intuitive way to build complex React applications with ease. It is widely used in the React community and has a...
Source: www.bocasay.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, React seems to be a lot more popular than jQuery UI. While we know about 818 links to React, we've tracked only 15 mentions of jQuery 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.

jQuery UI mentions (15)

  • Let Me Talk About Component-based Front-end Development
    The once popular jQuery, with its strengths fully utilized in jQuery UI and Bootstrap, provides many UI components and is also friendly to backend developers, seemingly meeting the requirements. However, looking at their component implementation and resource loading forms—. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • 100+ Must-Have Web Development Resources
    jQuery UI: An open-source library for building user interfaces based on jQuery. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • What is a component library and should you build your own?
    Fortunately, when I started web development in earnest, many of these issues were ironed out. By this point, there were still a handful of libraries that made writing complex interfaces with cross-browser support a little easier. Jquery UI, the first component library I used, supported accordions and other widgets. But the browser is constantly evolving, and we now have a native way of implementing this accordion... - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Best ReactJS library for Drag-n-Drop Table for plugin Admin view?
    Because WordPress is already have these jQuery & jQuery UI libraries (https://jqueryui.com/). Source: about 3 years ago
  • jQuery 3.6.2 Released
    We still use jQuery + jQuery UI on our website because it is basically battle tested through 15+ years. https://jqueryui.com/ It is easy as hell. What's there to not like? I don't care to be called names or being old fashioned. I also don't care about "right" tooling for frontend. As far it works and it is robust and it is going to be around for many years, I am fine with it. - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago
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React mentions (818)

  • Understanding Docker multi-stage builds
    Let's start by preparing a sample application that we want to place in a Docker image. This will be a web application created using the React framework and its create-react-app tool. It will generate a code template and configuration, allowing us to focus on the image creation aspects. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Node.js vs Python: Real Benchmarks, Performance Insights, and Scalability Analysis
    Python integrates seamlessly with machine learning (TensorFlow, PyTorch) and data analytics stacks (Pandas). Node.js integrates better with frontend JS ecosystems like React, Vue, and Next.js. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • What is the Most Effective AI Tool for App Development Today?
    Dora AI exemplifies this. Allan Murphy Bruun adds, "What makes it different is its context-aware logic stitching that understands user flows beyond just UI elements." By analyzing Figma designs, it generates React code with state management, saving hours in development. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • How to setup the Supabase authentication with Tanstack Router in Vite React.
    Import { createFileRoute } from "@tanstack/react-router"; Import logo from "../../logo.svg"; Import "../../App.css"; Export const Route = createFileRoute("/_authenticated/")({ component: AuthenticatedRoute, }); Function AuthenticatedRoute() { return (
    logo

    ...

    - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Indie Hacking with Open Source Tools: Innovating on a Budget
    One inspiring example is a developer building a "Todoist Clone" using a combination of React, Node.js, and MongoDB. The developer tapped into open source libraries and community support to create a highly responsive task management application. This project underscores how indie hackers can achieve rapid development and adaptation with minimal budget – a theme echoed in several indie hacking success stories. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing jQuery UI and React, you can also consider the following products

jQuery - The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library.

Vue.js - Reactive Components for Modern Web Interfaces

React Native - A framework for building native apps with React

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

Babel - Babel is a compiler for writing next generation JavaScript.

Svelte - Cybernetically enhanced web apps