Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

NativeBase VS Chakra UI

Compare NativeBase VS Chakra UI and see what are their differences

NativeBase logo NativeBase

Experience the awesomeness of React Native without the pain

Chakra UI logo Chakra UI

Simple, modular and accessible UI components for your React applications.
  • NativeBase Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-19
  • Chakra UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-08-13

NativeBase features and specs

  • Cross-Platform Compatibility
    NativeBase offers components that work seamlessly across both iOS and Android, ensuring a consistent user experience across different devices.
  • Rich Component Library
    Provides a vast collection of pre-built UI components, such as buttons, forms, navigations, and more, significantly speeding up the development process.
  • Customization
    Highly customizable themes and components that allow you to match the look and feel of your app to specific design requirements.
  • Community Support
    Active community and extensive documentation make it easier to find solutions to common problems and get support from fellow developers.
  • Integration with React Native
    Designed to work specifically with React Native, offering better integration and performance compared to more generalized component libraries.
  • Accessible Design
    Offers components and practices aimed at making apps more accessible, which is crucial for creating inclusive applications.

Possible disadvantages of NativeBase

  • Learning Curve
    Can have a steep learning curve for developers who are not familiar with React Native or component-based design.
  • Performance Overhead
    May introduce some performance overhead due to the abstraction layers, which might not be suitable for performance-critical applications.
  • Dependency Management
    Frequent updates and changes in the library can lead to dependency issues that require regular maintenance and updates.
  • Limited Advanced Customization
    While basic customization is easy, deeply customizing components to fit unique use cases can be challenging and may require additional effort.
  • Vendor Lock-in
    Relying heavily on any proprietary framework or library can make it difficult to switch technologies in the future, constraining flexibility.
  • Size
    The library can add to the overall size of the application, which might be a concern for apps where minimizing the footprint is crucial.

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.

NativeBase videos

NativeBase Market Purchase Flow

Chakra UI videos

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to NativeBase and Chakra UI)
Development Tools
33 33%
67% 67
Design Tools
7 7%
93% 93
Developer Tools
11 11%
89% 89
JavaScript Framework
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 NativeBase and Chakra UI

NativeBase Reviews

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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

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Chakra UI should be more popular than NativeBase. It has been mentiond 201 times since March 2021. 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.

NativeBase mentions (22)

  • Exploring the Best UI Component Libraries for React Native apps
    Gluestack, like any other customizable UI library, is built to make styling less cumbersome. It comprises a set of themed and unstyled components easily integrated across different platforms and devices. Originally, Gluestack was a part of NativeBase, a component library for both React and React Native. With performance and maintainability in mind, NativeBase was split into two parts, focusing on a universal... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Best headless UI libraries in React Native
    Just like the other libraries mentioned in this article, Gluestack is another unstyled component library. Originally a part of NativeBase, the developer team created this library to prevent bloat and enhance maintainability of the project. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • An Overview of 25+ UI Component Libraries in 2023
    KumaUI : Another relatively new contender, Kuma uses zero runtime CSS-in-JS to create headless UI components which allows a lot of flexibility. It was heavily inspired by other zero runtime CSS-in-JS solutions such as PandaCSS, Vanilla Extract, and Linaria, as well as by Styled System, ChakraUI, and Native Base. ### Vue. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • 7 Popular React Native UI Component Libraries You Should Know
    NativeBase is a collection of essential cross-platform React Native components. The components are built with React Native combined with some JavaScript functionality with customizable properties. NativeBase is fully open-source and has 18,000+ stars on GitHub. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • React vs React Native: How Different Are They, Really?
    CSS-based UI libs don't make sense on mobile; your new options include NativeBase, React Native Elements and others). Some web-based UI libs do have RN siblings though - such as React Native Material and React Native Paper (for Material-UI), and tailwind-rn (for Tailwind). This just means new decisions to make, some learning, and new paradigms for how to use the new libs. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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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 / 3 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 / 8 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 / 10 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 / 11 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
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What are some alternatives?

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

React Native Desktop - Build OS X desktop apps using React Native

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

React Native UI Kitten - Customizable and reusable react-native component kit

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

React Native Paper by Callstack - Material Design for React Native (Android & iOS)

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