Top 8 Next.js UI frameworks to use in 2025

Next.js UI libraries are a bunch of pre-built, fresh and easy-to-integrate UI elements that play well with the Next.js framework. The visual portion of your website or web application is the best way to understand it - imagine that it functions as a toolkit. Instead of you creating a button, form or navbar from scratch every time, you can just take a component from the library and drop it into your project.

Key Characteristics

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- Reusability: ** When it comes to reusability, the whole point is you can reuse these components across your application, such as buttons, cards, modals and input fields. This saves a tonne of time and power.

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- Uniformity: ** A single library also ensures all the components in your application look and feel the same way, which is crucial for a good user experience as well as brand identity.

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- Tailorability: ** If you prefer newer UI component libraries in Next.js, they are highly customisable. In most cases, you may change colours, font sizes, and other design properties to resonate with the same design system of your project.

Next.js Compatibility: These libraries are often made with Next in mind. One of these will be server components that enable us to do server-side rendering - and therefore also cater for the reduction of JavaScript being generated automatically.

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1. Tailwind CSS (Utility-First Framework)

Now Tailwind is not really a component library but more of a framework to build component libraries. This is a basic part of the infrastructure for many other libraries.

  - TECHNICAL PROS

  - Small, optimised CSS bundle:** The Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler will only include the CSS classes you actually use in your project, which means the compiled file could be significantly smaller. This dramatically decreases page load time.

  - **No CSS Naming Conflicts —** The utility-first approach removes the necessity to name classes (e.g., card-title, btn-primary) that can lead to naming collisions and make it difficult to work on large projects.

  - **Fast Server-rendered CSS:** Because Tailwind generates static CSS, it fits perfectly with Next. Server-Side Rendering (SSR) and Server Components in JS, with no layout shifts or FOUC (Flash of Unstyled Content).





  - TECHNICAL CONS

  - **Verbose HTML:** Applying multiple utility classes directly into an HTML tag makes the JSX/HTML file messy and hard to read, mainly for complex components.

  - **Build-Time Dependency: ** As Tailwind needs to be transpiled with PostCSS first, Tailwind can increase the build time a little bit.

  - **State Management: ** To handle component state (like hover and focus) or conditional rendering needs more boiler logic in your JavaScript that a library with all of this wrapped up nicely as props.

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2. Shadcn UI (Component Snippets)

Shadcn UI is a Tailwind CSS and Radix UI styled component. This is a new approach where you keep code ownership of the components.

  - TECHNICAL PROS

  - No Dependencies (for components):** You are directly copy-pasting the component code, not adding a huge library as a dependency. No versioning conflicts for the components themselves.

  - **Source Control:** You get access to the source code of the component so you can modify it for your needs (custom hook, deep customisation…) or fix a bug within the library (without having to wait for a new release).

  - **Performance:** Due to Radix being a headless system and Tailwind offering tiny CSS, it is fairly performant with very small bundle sizes.





  - TECHNICAL CONS

  - **Manual Updates:** This means that when a component is updated, you must manually update it in your project by running the CLI command. Unfortunately, it takes a little more maintenance than just an npm update.

  - **Code duplication: ** The component code lives within your project, bloating it and creating more files to manage.

  - **You need more tech knowledge: ** Rise is less of a piece-of-cake "plug-and-play" than LearnDash. In order to use and customise Radix UI, developers need to know how it interfaces with Tailwind CSS.

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3. Chakra UI (Styled System)

Chakra UI is a popular community-powered, accessible, out-of-the-box component library running on a styled system.

  - TECHNICAL PROS

  - It scores high on developer experience, offering a component-based API and props-based styling (<box p="4">) that is lightning fast to develop with and user-friendly when prototyping.

  - In-built Accessibility: ** Chakra UI components are built in with strong accessibility so that developers could be at peace while designing for users.

  - **SSR Compatibility:** It seamlessly works with Next.js  a solid base for SSR in JS client-rendered apps.

  - The library comes with the highly configurable, robust theming system, enabling you to easily style your UI components and enforce design best practices across a variety of user experiences.





  - TECHNICAL CONS

  - Chakra UI is a full design system and comes up with a lot of things, causing it to have a larger bundle size than utility-first or headless solutions.

  - **Performance Overhead: **styled-system and CSS-in-JS approaches can sometimes be marginally slower in runtime performance compared to a pure CSS-based solution, but this is typically within acceptable limits for most applications.

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4. Material UI (MUI) (Styled Components)

Material-UI is a React library that acts as per Google Material Design. It uses Emotion-CSS in JS to style the components.

  - TECHNICAL PROS

  - Vast Component Library: **It provides a massive collection of components that are being actively developed, including complex ones like data grids and date pickers; this saves countless hours of development.

  - **Support: ** Very mature and well-maintained, as it has existed for a number of years and amassed quite an ecosystem of add-on stems of tools.

  - **TypeScript support: ** MUI has some of the best TypeScript support out there with strong type safety and autocompletion for components and props.





  - TECHNICAL CONS

  - **High Bundle Size: **Because MUI is a comprehensive component library, it can significantly increase the bundle size, which could be detrimental to initial page load performance.

  - **Opinionated Design: **It adheres to the philosophy of Material Design, and it is a little bit hard to stand out with your own unique non-Material style UI without customisation.

  - **Slower load times: ** CSS-in-JS libraries can increase the amount of time it takes to render your website, especially during initial render as opposed to static CSS frameworks.

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5. NextUI 

NextUI is a modern and lightweight library based on Stitches (another CSS-in-JS library) optimised for Next.js.

  - TECHNICAL PROS

  - SSR Compatibility: **It is designed around SSR and plays nicely with Next.js, and it's pretty much the best server-rendered experience that you get, right?

  - **Clean Design: ** A refined overall design with smooth animations and an emphasis on performance.

  - **Stitches Performance: ** Stitches is arguably the fastest CSS-in-JS solution, with a virtual 0 runtime penalty.





  - TECHNICAL CONS

  - **More Limited Component Library: **Since it is a newer library, its component set seems smaller and not as feature-rich as MUI or Ant Design.

  - **Original: ** More Immature Ecosystem The community and ecosystem are smaller; that means you will find fewer resources or third-party integrations.

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6. Ant Design (Styled Components)

A few other options that spring to mind are Semantic UI, Materialize CSS or some others but this article will cover the Ant Design (AntD) mainly, as it is becoming somewhat of a standard among other possible choices for an enterprise-level library with clear design language, especially in data-richer applications and admin dashboards.

  - TECHNICAL PROS

  - These are enterprise-grade components: **It offers very advanced components supporting data entry, display and feedback, such as even complex forms, tables, charts, etc.

  - **Advanced Theming and Internationalisation: ** With full skinning support, GWT provides an extensive internationalisation (i18n) solution in the box.

  - **Fully tuned TypeScript: ** But the fact that it's written in TypeScript means that you have top-notch type definitions for everything and an API that has been thought out thoroughly.





  - TECHNICAL CONS

  - **Ant Design:  **The bundle size is a huge issue with Ant Design - it is not properly tree-shakeable, so you have to be very careful which component to import, and the use of imports largely defeats the purpose of any library.

  - An opinionated design philosophy and a large API may not be the easiest to learn, especially if you are not already in concordance with his views on how software should be written.

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7. Flowbite (Tailwind Components)

Flowbite is a collection of pre-styled HTML components that use Tailwind CSS classes - whether through the framework or using straight-from-the-Tailwind build - plus there will be corresponding JavaScript for interactivity.

  - TECHNICAL PROS

  - It enables seamless integration of existing or future to-do lists with Tailwind CSS components, making them all 100% compatible, allowing you to plug and play as well as customise them with utility classes most easily.

  - Speed of Development: ** Yeah, copy-paste components make it the perfect candidate for quick prototyping and development.

  - Being built on top of Tailwind means it comes with all the speed and optimisation benefits of a tiny CSS bundle.





  - TECHNICAL CONS

  - HTML Snippets of Flowbite (Not a "React" Library) React versions exist but tend not to be introspective or stateful with the cadence of a React component library.

  - **Interactive Management: ** The majority of the time you can place your interactivity in its own JavaScript file (example: flowbite.min.js) for React/Next that may not be as idiomatic in the modern era. React/Redux seems well-designed for an airflow.js app where component logic is self-contained.

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8. Headless UI (Unstyled Components)

Headless UI offers accessible and unstyled components, giving you full control over how the component will look.

  - TECHNICAL PROS

  - No Styles: **You have complete control of the visual design, so reconsider if your design & brand standard has this as a con. This is great for projects that have a particularly custom design system.

  - **Accessibility - **  Headless UI components have been painstakingly engineered to be fully accessible, with all the right focus management, keyboard navigation and ARIA attributes providing you a great developer experience.

  - **Module Size: ** The library itself is practically zero in terms of module size, as it only contains functionalities and no CSS styling.

  - **Framework-agnostic logic: ** The components inside are built with resilient fundamental principles and can be adapt to any styling approach (Tailwind CSS, CSS Modules or Styled Components)





  - TECHNICAL CONS

  - **Higher Development Time: **Unlike pre-styled libraries where you drag and drop a component, here you have to style every element manually, so it is more time-consuming.

  - **Design Skill: **It is assumed that either you possess (or your team has) a fairly good design skill set and a strongly established design system, as it comes to you as a blank slate.

  - **It is not an out-of-the-box solution: **It's not meant as a quick way to stand up a UI from scratch but rather as a starting point for constructing your design system.

Conclusion

The perfect UI library for the next selection of ts vs. js depends on the project specifics and the expertise in your team. Tools like Tailwind CSS and Headless UI are utility-first, which gives you the flexibility. Libraries like Ant Design, MUI and Chakra UI make it easy to develop since they offer so many components. NextUI has been built for an amazing SSR that flows with Flowbite. Decide which one offers the best combination of design and performance while keeping long-term maintenance in mind for your app.