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Comment by tmvnty | Hacker News Reader

So for a React developer who doesn't want to include Shadcn/Radix, but also doesn't have time to build every component/a11y/compat/edge cases from scratch, what are the better alternatives?

Would be nice to list them here so developers can know a midpoint between DIY <-> Shadcn/Radix

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One midpoint is traditional css frameworks like https://getbootstrap.com/.

Not as powerful, and you don't get this sweet 3rd-party pluggable component catalog, but it's much simpler and it's stable: there's no constantly evolving ecosystem.

Shadcn ecosystem might have calmed down by now, but when I used it years ago, the layers on top of it were super unstable, and I was annoyed every time I have to work on those projects until I got Opus 4.5 to refactor out of them.

There are many options, each with their own pros and cons. Also, you may or may not like their default styling and/or styling options. There is no one size fits all. Having said that, we maintain an incomplete list of popular UI libraries here:

https://frontaid.ch/web/ui/libraries.html

I'd never heard of Ark UI before, and as a svelte and solidjs dabbler it's great it supports multiple frameworks. Thanks for this site!

https://react-aria.adobe.com is the new Radix, it provides unstyled components with a heavy focus on accessibility and quality. https://github.com/heroui-inc/heroui is the new Shadcn.

One thing to keep in mind regarding a11y, the semantic web is accessible by default. It's once you break away from establish norms do things become harder or tricky, but if you can stick to using actual semantic elements and not div-soup you will cover 90% of your use cases (assuming your use case isn't relying on just the canvas element).

You don't want to build your own components but you also don't want to use pre-made components? At some point you have to pick one. If you really want a midpoint, it's literally Radix: behaviours are done, stylings are up to you

I heard that a more modern alternative to radix is react-aria: https://react-aria.adobe.com/

Claude Code can whip this stuff together quickly if you specify those constraints and are knowledgeable enough to know what’s possible with modern CSS, etc.

just discovered this link: https://designsystems.surf/design-systems

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