Headless UI

Headless UI

Headless UI is an unstyled, fully accessible UI component library for React. It provides composable UI building blocks without any built-in styles, allowing developers to style components to match their product design system.
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Headless UI alternatives ➤

Headless UI: Unstyled, Accessible UI Component Library

A fully accessible and composable UI component library for React without built-in styles, designed to match your product design system.

What is Headless UI?

Headless UI is an open-source, unstyled, and fully accessible UI component library for React apps. It was created by the team at Vercel to provide developers with ready-made React UI components that have full accessibility support built-in, but no visual styling.

The key concept behind Headless UI is the separation of semantic UI structure and visual styling. The Headless UI components handle all the interaction logic, accessibility features, and component composition, while the developer can style the components with CSS to match their design system.

This means that Headless UI components come without any predefined visual styles. Instead, they expose CSS classes and style props that allow the consumer full control over the visual styling. Developers can use utility CSS libraries like Tailwind CSS to quickly style Headless UI components.

Some of the key benefits of Headless UI include:

  • Fully accessible UI components out of the box
  • Composable and customizable component API
  • BYO (Bring your own) styling approach fits any design system
  • Small bundle size footprint
  • Tree shakeable imports to only include needed components

Headless UI has components for common UI patterns like dialogs, tabs, menus, popovers and more. Since it is developed specifically for React, it provides great integration with React concepts like hooks. Overall, it aims to save designers and developers effort by providing unstyled, accessible UI building blocks for React apps.

Headless UI Features

Features

  1. Unstyled UI components
  2. Accessible by default
  3. Composable
  4. Works with any CSS-in-JS solution
  5. Tree shaking support
  6. Dark mode support
  7. Keyboard navigable
  8. Screen reader friendly

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

No built-in styles allows full customization

Accessible components out of the box

Flexible and composable API

Lightweight with tree shaking

Integrates with any CSS solution

Dark mode support built-in

Cons

Requires styling components yourself

Less features than full component libraries

Less opinionated than complete UI frameworks

Smaller community than more popular libraries

Official Links

Official Website
https://headlessui.dev

The Best Headless UI Alternatives

Top Development and Ui Libraries and other similar apps like Headless UI

Here are some alternatives to Headless UI:

Materialize icon
Materialize
Bulma icon
Bulma
UIkit icon
UIkit
JQuery Mobile icon
jQuery Mobile
Skeleton icon
Skeleton
Semantic UI icon
Semantic UI
Suggest an alternative ❐

Materialize icon

Materialize

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Skeleton icon

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Skeleton is an open source, lightweight front-end framework for developing responsive web pages and apps. It's designed to be a starting point rather than a UI library like Bootstrap or Foundation.Here are some key features of Skeleton:Lightweight at just 400 lines of CSSFully responsive grid down to mobile devicesSyntax highlighting...
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Semantic UI icon

Semantic UI

Semantic UI is an open-source front-end development framework that helps web developers build consistent, responsive web pages and web applications. It provides theming capabilities, templates, and reusable UI components to quickly build modern interfaces.Some key features of Semantic UI:Responsive grid system for building responsive layoutsprebuilt UI components like buttons, menus,...
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