Posted on 16th January, 2022
User interface plays an important role in any web application. It's like the very first impression you have which would likely determine whether you'd consider visiting it again or not. Today, we have many libraries available in many modern Javascript libraries for creating user interfaces, layouts and handling events. The purpose of these UI libraries is to get you started quickly without the need of writing too much pure Javascript or CSS. Many of these frameworks also scale to mobile devices with their prowess in handling responsiveness.
For this list, I'd be considering Vue JS and some of the most popular and widely used user interface libraries available in it. It could be difficult to rank front-end frameworks based on design because something which could appeal to you might not appeal to someone else. But, there are however some parameters which I've keep in mind while sort of ranking these libraries. These parameters would be Number of components available, Learning curve, Responsiveness, Community support, Github Stars and contributors. Before I begin the list, I just want to confess while ranking UI libraries it is very difficult for me to not let my personal design taste influence the ranking, but would try my best nevertheless. Also, only Open Source libraries would be considered for this list.
I'd start with my favorite framework in this list. It is one of the very few popular Vue UI libraries which has support for Vue 3. Also, it comes equipped with Typescript (which is optional) support and it's own CLI tool for blazing fast app development. There are multiple ways you can start your Quasar project depending on what options you pick while initiating your project through Quasar CLI. It has 20K + stars on Github.
A UI library which has Tailwind components tailored to be used in Vue. It seems there is no official logo for this package. I am a big fan of Tailwind CSS, I've used this probably the most. I like how it is configurable with relative ease. Tailwind CSS provides a lot of pseudo classes which you can use to apply aesthetic animations on Vue Tailwind Components. I hardly ever remember writing even a single line of custom CSS whenever I used this library. As of now, it is only available for Vue 2. It has 1.7K stars on Github at the time of writing this. But, in my opinion it definitely deserves more. You can find the documentation and the Github repo link for this project below.
Vue Tailwind - Official Website
Created by PrimeFaces.org, PrimeVue also comes with rich support for Vue 3. In my opinion it has one of the best designs out of all the popular UI libraries in Vue. It seems like PrimeVue components take inspiration from Tailwind CSS in terms of design. It has a large collection of basic as well as advanced components like ScrollToTop, Charts, Terminal Component, Tags and more. It has 2K stars on Github. Please find the Github and documentation links for PrimeVue below
https://github.com/primefaces/primevue
https://www.primefaces.org/primevue/showcase/#/setup
One of the most popular UI libraries for Vue perhaps only topped by Element UI. It has 33K+ stars on Github and it is build on top of Google's material design.
Library which has ready to use components made in Vue using Bulma CSS for styling. It has 9K+ stars on Github. It does rely strongly on Bulma CSS classes for creating grid and flex based containers.
Bootstrap is still the most widely used CSS framework in the development community. VueJS might not be as popular like React and Angular in enterprise level projects at the time of writing this post, but it is still the most starred frontend framework on Github. Both Vue and Bootstrap are among 15 most starred repositories on Github. This open source project contains dynamic components which are built combining Vue and Bootstrap like Modals, Tooltips, Carousel and more. It is one of the easiest to learn frameworks for beginners. On Github it has almost 14K stars.
https://github.com/bootstrap-vue/bootstrap-vue
https://bootstrap-vue.org/docs
Chakra is one of my favourite frameworks. Originally written for 'React', there is also a version available for 'Vue'. I found it one of the easiest frameworks to configure and get started with. It has 24k stars on Github. Below are the links for the documentation for both React and Vue versions.
https://github.com/chakra-ui/chakra-ui
Element UI is by far the most starred user interface component library in Vue 2 with 52k + stars. There is also a version in Beta phase called Element Plus for Vue 3. It also has one of the most starred dashboard projects on Github. One of the things I appreciate in this framework is how easy it is to perform validation on frontend for form related data. As of the downsides of this, I'd say not a very big fan of the default CSS it has and it was slightly complicated to re-write those CSS for me.
Vuesax is one of the lesser known libraries on this list. The components in Vuesax seem to take styling inspiration from Tailwind CSS. I made a project using this long back. I had issues with responsiveness. It has 5k+ stars on Github at the time of writing this post.
A UI library for Vue 2 created by Creative Tim. It has almost 10k stars on Github. I had the pleasure of working in this library a couple of years ago on a freelance project. It is built on top of Material UI.
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