Pick by how you want to work, not by popularity

A component library is a long commitment to a way of working. Some hand you a finished design system so you ship fast. Others hand you raw, accessible behavior and let you style every pixel yourself. Pick the one that matches how much control you actually want.

The spectrum, with four concrete examples

Think of the choices as a dial from "you own every pixel" to "we designed it for you". Here is where each kit sits.

Radix Primitives sits at the raw end. It ships zero CSS. What you get is behavior: keyboard navigation, ARIA attributes, focus management, all spec-correct and tested. shadcn/ui is built on top of Radix, so picking Radix directly means doing what shadcn does for you, yourself. Pick it when your design is so custom that no existing style layer would survive contact with your Figma file.

shadcn/ui is one step up. It copies the component source into your repo and styles it with Tailwind. You do not install a package you cannot touch. You edit the actual file. Pick it when you want accessible defaults, a clean Tailwind starting point, and full freedom to change anything without fighting a library's CSS specificity.

Chakra UI v3 sits in the middle. Components are styled and themeable through a token system. The v3 rewrite runs on Zag.js state machines and plays well with React Server Components. Pick it when you want a consistent visual language out of the box but still need a clear path to override colors, spacing, and radius through a theme config, not by hunting class names.

Mantine is at the batteries-included end. One install gives you 100-plus components plus hooks, a form system, a date picker, a rich-text editor, a notifications stack, and more. There is almost nothing you need to wire up yourself. Pick it when shipping speed matters more than visual control, or when you are building an internal tool or admin panel where matching a pixel-perfect design is not the goal.