What is Shadcn UI and why you should use it?

If you're keeping up with the fast-paced world of web development, you've likely heard of shadcn/ui. Since its initial launch in March 2023, this innovative React component library has quickly become a game-changer in the UI components space for frontend development.

In this blog, we will dive deep into Shadcn UI, exploring what it is and how it stands out from traditional solutions we've used until now. We'll also look at the various features it offers, and why you should consider using it.

What is Shadcn UI?

The official documentation states that shadcn/ui is not a component library. It is a collection of reusable components that you copy-paste into your codebase. The components are part of your codebase and not a third-party dependency you installed.

Shadcn UI provides pre-built components that can be entirely customized to match your application's design system. This means you're not limited to a predefined style, as you would be with other component libraries. Instead, it delivers all of the functionality while letting you customize the appearance and feel.

The best part is, shadcn/ui is open-source. You can explore the entire codebase, see how things are done, and take inspiration from it to build something of your own.

How Shadcn UI components are built?

Shadcn UI leverages what’s already widely used and loved by the web-dev community. This not only reduces the friction for developers to get started with it but also helps build a massive trust around it.

Shadcn UI uses the following at its core:

1. Radix UI: At its foundation, Shadcn UI utilizes Radix primitives to offer a suite of accessible, headless UI components. These components provide the structure and behavior, while the styling and layout are left entirely up to you.
2. Tailwind CSS: Shadcn UI uses Tailwind CSS for styling, which provides a utility-first approach to CSS and enables rapid UI development.
3. TypeScript: The entire library is written in TypeScript, offering strong typing and improved developer experience.

How Shadcn UI Differs from Other Libraries?

Since React’s release in 2014, many libraries and frameworks have emerged for building UI. These include CSS-in-JS approaches like styled-components and component libraries like Headless UI, Bootstrap, and Material UI. While each has its advantages, they often come with significant trade-offs.

Challenges and Limitations with Traditional Approach

Most component libraries require installation as NPM dependencies, leading to several issues.

1. Version Management: Ensuring compatibility with other dependencies and handling updates can be time-consuming and potentially disruptive.
2. Customization Hurdles: Adapting pre-built components to match your design system often involves complex overrides and can break with library updates.
3. Performance Concerns: Importing entire libraries can bloat your bundle size, even using only a few components.
4. Learning Curve: Each library has its API and conventions to master.

Shadcn UI emerges as a revolution, addressing common pain points, and offering a unique perspective.

How Shadcn UI revolutionized UI components?

Shadcn UI takes a radically different approach. It strips away all the tradeoffs we discussed in the last section and offers ready-to-use components to use.

1. No External Dependencies: Components live directly in your codebase, eliminating version conflicts and update headaches.
2. Full Control: By copying the component code directly into your project, you have complete ownership and control over the implementation.
3. Tailored Customization: Easily adapt components to your existing design system without constraints.
4. Seamless Integration: Works with your existing tools and leverages your knowledge of technologies you are already familiar with.
5. Future-Proof Development: Components evolve with your project, independent of third-party roadmaps.

Features of Shadcn UI

Even though Shadcn UI is just a repository of reusable React components, it offers a lot more than that. There are several features that make Shadcn UI the perfect UI component library to use.

Shadcn Themes

Shadcn UI offers a powerful theming system that allows us to easily customize the look and feel of their applications. This system leverages CSS variables to provide a flexible way to create and switch between different themes.

When you initialize Shadcn UI, a default theme is created based on your prompt selection (more on this later). You can see it in the project’s default CSS file (eg. globals.css for Next.js). You can create custom themes or extend the existing theme by modifying the values from this file.

You can also customize the theme on the official website. It allows you to change the style, base color, border radius, and theme (dark or light). You can copy customized styles and paste them into your CSS file.

Shadcn Blocks

Blocks provide a powerful tool for developers to rapidly prototype and build robust, attractive user interfaces while maintaining the flexibility to customize every aspect of the design. It’s just a combination of several Shadcn UI components to build sections like Dashboard, authentication pages, charts, etc.

There’s an interesting feature inside Blocks called “Lift Mode” that lifts components from a block template for copy and paste. That means you can copy the smaller parts that make up a block template like cards, forms, etc.

There are 12 Blocks you can use right now at the time of writing this blog. You can request a new block as well. Check out existing Blocks here.

Integrating v0 by Vercel with Shadcn UI

v0 is Vercel’s AI-assisted development platform that builds frontend apps based on user prompts. With the recent updates, you can open components, blocks, and charts directly to v0 to edit them further. This enables a more natural and narrow-down approach to get what you want.

Shadcn Charts

In its recent update two months ago, charts were introduced in addition to the existing components. Built on top of Recharts, it provides easy-to-use, customizable chart components for data visualization. These charts seamlessly integrate with the shadcn UII design system, ensuring consistency across your application.

There are six chart types available with a variety of options and configurations. You can change the theme, add or remove parts of the chart (e.g. legend, header, description, etc), and directly copy-paste it into your codebase.

Shadcn CLI

The Shadcn CLI is a tool that lets you add components directly from the command line. Just last month, in August 2024, the entire CLI was rewritten from scratch. Previously, you could only add new components via the CLI. With the new update, you can now install themes, hooks, utilities, and much more.

The new CLI also supports installing components from a URL. This allows you to install components directly from remote resources like v0. Most importantly, the existing Tailwind configuration remains unchanged, with only the necessary additions appended to the existing file.

Should I use Shadcn for my project?

Although this React component library has gained significant traction and has been popular amongst React developers, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Here are some scenarios where using Shadcn UI as your “component library” would be a good decision:

1. Junior to mid-level developers looking to enhance their React and component design skills.
2. Early-stage products like MVPs or hackathon projects, or businesses like small startups that are rapidly iterating on products.
3. Applications that need to meet strict accessibility guidelines or serve users with specific needs.
4. Finally, developers who often find themselves "fighting" with opinionated UI libraries, or just have a bad design sense :p

Here are some scenarios where you could think of alternative solutions:

1. Teams with a strong emphasis on unique, brand-specific user interfaces.
2. Enterprise applications, SaaS products, and other long-lived projects.
3. Projects with extremely tight deadlines might benefit from a more opinionated UI library that requires less decision-making.
4. When you’re just a beginner and learning React, CSS, or building components. In such cases, you should just aim to build things by yourself.

If you are thinking of using Shadcn into your React project you should read more about how to use shadcn in nextjs here!

Wrapping up

Shadcn UI is the perfect React component library for anyone building frontend applications in 2024. Whether you’re building a POC, an MVP, or a side project, Shadcn UI components would make your work so much easier by providing ready-to-use components that are accessible, robust, and optimized while giving you full ownership.

Have you used Shadcn UI in your projects? How was your experience? Or do you use something else to build your own component library? I would love to know. Feel free to reach out to me on Peerlist or Twitter to share your thoughts.

And if you are looking for a Frontend Developer Jobs, you will find many good opportunities on Peerlist Jobs. Don't forget to check them out.

Until then, keep building! 👨‍💻