Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Semantic UI VS Chakra UI

Compare Semantic UI VS Chakra UI and see what are their differences

Semantic UI logo Semantic UI

A UI Component library implemented using a set of specifications designed around natural language

Chakra UI logo Chakra UI

Simple, modular and accessible UI components for your React applications.
  • Semantic UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-20
  • Chakra UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-08-13

Semantic UI features and specs

  • Intuitive Class Names
    Semantic UI uses human-readable class names that describe their purpose, making it easy to understand and write code without consulting documentation frequently.
  • Customizability
    Semantic UI allows for deep customizability with its theming, letting developers adjust the default designs to match specific project requirements.
  • Comprehensive Components
    Semantic UI provides a wide range of pre-built components like buttons, forms, and modals, which can significantly speed up development time.
  • Flexibility
    The framework offers flexibility in terms of its modular structure, enabling developers to import only the components they need.
  • Detailed Documentation
    Semantic UI has detailed and well-organized documentation, which helps developers quickly resolve issues and understand how to use various features.

Possible disadvantages of Semantic UI

  • Large File Size
    The framework's comprehensive nature can lead to larger file sizes, which might affect the load times of web applications.
  • Learning Curve
    Despite its intuitive naming conventions, the breadth of components and features can result in a steep learning curve for new developers.
  • Community Support
    Unlike more popular frameworks like Bootstrap, Semantic UI has a smaller community, which can mean fewer third-party plugins and community support.
  • Incomplete Integration
    Some integrations with newer JavaScript frameworks such as React or Vue might require extra effort or third-party libraries, given that Semantic UI is not natively designed for them.
  • Infrequent Updates
    The development and updates to Semantic UI have been less frequent compared to other UI frameworks, potentially leading to compatibility and security issues.

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.

Semantic UI videos

Semantic UI In 60 Minutes

Chakra UI videos

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Semantic UI and Chakra UI)
Design Tools
34 34%
66% 66
CSS Framework
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
37 37%
63% 63
Development Tools
36 36%
64% 64

User comments

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Reviews

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

Semantic UI Reviews

22 Best Bootstrap Alternatives & What Each Is Best For
I chose Semantic UI because of its intuitive and accessible approach to design. Its use of human-friendly HTML sets it apart from many other frameworks, making it a more natural choice for developers prioritizing user-friendly designs. From my perspective, Semantic UI is the best tool for creating websites and applications that are easy for both developers and end users to...
Source: thectoclub.com
10 Best Free React UI Libraries in 2023
The styling of Semantic UI React is based on the Semantic UI theme and it's also free from jQuery. Apart from that, there are other useful features like augmentation, shorthand props, auto controlled state, etc.
11 Best Material UI Alternatives
Semantic UI supports theming and customization, allowing developers to customize the appearance of their UI components to align with their project’s branding. With its intuitive syntax and detailed documentation, Semantic UI is a valuable tool for designing and developing modern web interfaces.
Source: www.uxpin.com
Top 10 Best CSS Frameworks for Front-End Developers in 2022
If you’re just starting out with CSS and UI, go for Tacit, Pure, or Skeleton. However, to build more complex elements, you’ll need a more inclusive framework like Foundation, Tailwind, or Bootstrap. You can get an easy learning curve through Bulma or Semantic UI.
Source: hackr.io
15 Best CSS Frameworks: Professional Bootstrap and Foundation Alternatives
If you exclude the fact that Semantic UI doesn’t have the utility classes Bootstrap offers, it is a comprehensive CSS framework that you should try. The best Semantic feature allows you to write HTML code without using BEM methodologies.

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 seems to be a lot more popular than Semantic UI. While we know about 201 links to Chakra UI, we've tracked only 19 mentions of Semantic 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.

Semantic UI mentions (19)

  • 100+ Must-Have Web Development Resources
    Semantic UI: A fully semantic front-end development framework. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Ant Design – the second most popular React UI framework
    Semantic UI[1] was one I used to use, both the plain CSS one as well as the React version of the library. Version 3.0 is coming (eventually), which has left it a bit outdated for a while, but it's still a solid UI library imho. I have been switching away to Tailwind. [1]: https://semantic-ui.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Ask HN: I'm bad at design, which stops me from finishing side projects. Advice?
    What stack are you using? I personally recommend utilizing readily available components: https://ui.shadcn.com/ https://mui.com/ https://semantic-ui.com/ etc.. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • I hate CSS: how can I build UIs?
    Are you cool with JS frameworks? If so, you can use a higher level of abstraction that takes care of the CSS for you. If you just want to mock something up, you can use a pre-built UI system / component framework and just put together UIs declaratively, without having to worry about the underlying CSS or HTML at all. Examples include https://mui.com/ and https://chakra-ui.com/ and https://ant.design/ Really easy... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Software Design Document - Lite
    Honestly you should build a webpage and use a UI library if you want markdown with some extra pop. Check out semantic ui. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

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

What are some alternatives?

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

Bootstrap - Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and JS for popular UI components and interactions

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

Materialize CSS - A modern responsive front-end framework based on Material Design

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

UIKit - A lightweight and modular front-end framework for developing fast and powerful web interfaces

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