Insight to determine the best UI library for your Vue project

Over the past few years, Vue.js has stepped up firmly, becoming a strong contender to compete with Angular and React. If we look at Vue’s growth, it relates to the framework’s simplicity, availability of libraries, components, and learning materials to strengthen the ecosystem. Besides, Vue also comes with a good set of UI component libraries to choose from.

This article will focus on 3 excellent UI components libraries built for Vue, which stand out from the rest.

1. Quasar

Source: https://quasar.dev/

First on our list is Quasar, which is an open-source UI library/framework developed for Vue. It allows you to quickly develop responsive single-page applications, progressive web apps, and server-side rendered apps. Apart from that, you can use Quasar in mobile and desktop applications.

Quasar emphasizes a single code base for all web, mobile, and desktop solutions while providing powerful CLI and UI components.

Quasar is also known as a framework that follows coding best practices. In fact, Quasar comes with some inbuilt best practices by default, and you do not need to do any extra configurations for that. Some of those best practices are as follows:

• HTML/CSS/JS minification.
• Cache busting.
• Tree shaking.
• Source-mapping.
• Code-splitting with lazy loading.
• Linting code.

If we look into the stats about Quasar, it has more than 16000 stars and 350+ contributors. These stats seem to be growing rapidly in recent times, and companies like Jounce, Qrstore, Whiteboard-it, Biting Bit, and Decision6 have started their journey with Quasar.

Pros

• Web components with high performance and responsiveness.
• Integrated best practices.
• Large community and documentations.
• Follows material 2.0 design.
• RTL support.
• High security.
• It can easily migrate existing projects.

Cons

• Quasar is known for a framework developed by a single person (At least for the most part), causing some maintenance issues in the future.

2. Vuetify

Source: https://vuetifyjs.com/en/

Vuetify is another UI framework based on Vue.js, and it provides a reusable, clean set of components for the developers to build solutions with rich user experience. Similar to Quasar, Vuetify supports almost all web browsers and offers templates for web development, progressive web apps, mobile development(Cordova), and for desktop app development(Electron) as well.

Vuetify follows the standards of material design.

However, for some, these standards could feel a bit strict. Besides, practicing material design brings some advantages like reusability and standardization of styles for the users. Apart from that, Vuetify provides a set of dynamic layouts to customize your application and SASS variables to customize components.

If we consider the GitHub stats, Vuetify has more than 27900 stars in its repository with more than 550 contributors, which places Vuetify a bit ahead of Quasar. Taigbot, qfl-stack, FinTech Consortium, Bitting bit are some leading companies that use Vuetify as their UI framework.

Pros

• Reusable components.
• Enables beauty for graphically challenged developers.
• A large variety of components.
• Browser compatibility.
• Material designs.
• Large community and good documentation.
• Constant updates.

Cons

• If you are not very fond of material designs, Vuetify might not be the best choice.
• Customization is a bit more challenging.

3. Bootstrap Vue

Source: https://bootstrap-vue.org/

Bootstrap can be named as the most famous front-end framework used in websites and web applications. BootstrapVue is a customized version of bootstrap which was developed for Vue JS. BootstrapVue contains more than 85 components, over 45 available plugins, directives, themes, and 1100+ icons. BootstrapVue also includes a detailed implementation from the bootstrap 4 component and grid system.

Being a part of the Bootstrap family has enabled BootstrapVue to use regular bootstrap elements as Vue components.

If you are familiar with Bootstrap, the learning curve will be relatively short, and you will get a head start on using it.

Ophigo, Channext Platform, Keymentics can be recognized as major companies that use BootstrapVue, and the GitHub repository has more than 12000 stars with nearly 300 contributors under its name.

Pros

• Mobile-first responsive layout.
• Quick and easy styling.
• You can only import specific components, groups, components, and directives.
• Automated WAI-ARIA accessibility markup.
• Modern functionalities acquired from Bootstrap.
• Create themes with SCSS variables and global options.
• Large community and documentations.

Cons

• Customization is a bit more challenging.

#vuetify #javascript #quasar #vuejs #bootstrap