Top 10 Vue Component Libraries for 2020

JavaScript is the heart and soul of modern web application development. It’s one of the key tools of front-end development as well. With many JS frameworks, Vue.js is the most popular one.

Vue is a progressive and relatively young JavaScript framework suitable for any project scale. It’s lightweight, customizable, and flexible with a low learning curve. Coupled with cutting-edge tools, it helps you to build single-page apps (SPAs). All that makes Vue.js one of the ultimate solutions on the market.

How to Decide Which UI Library Suits You Best?

It’s a common practice for enterprises to tailor UI components to a particular project or product. However, any project has time and budget restrictions. Using Vue UI component libraries seems to be a natural step for reducing time, speeding up web development, and reducing technical debt. 

Here are the things to look out choosing a UI library:

• Why do you need to use a UI library?
• How will you approach a mobile version of your app or website?
• What if library support is not comprehensive, and the community is not numerous?
• What are the key components of your project?
• Does accessibility matter?
• Do you need server-side rendering?

With a myriad of libraries available, choosing the one to fit in might be tough. To ease the developers’ plight and save time, our team has prepared the guidelines on top Vue component libraries for 2020. Most of the libraries mentioned in the article are based on Ant Design, Material Design, or support Vue integrations for framework-agnostic UI libraries.

Top 10 Vue Component Libraries

#1. Element UI

Element UI is a Vue toolkit for desktop and web apps. It’s one of the most commonly used Vue libraries and one of the pioneers in the ecosystem providing Typescript binding, default kits for Laravel, and general-purpose projects.

This UI library is not a go-to for building mobile apps, as it’s not that responsive on mobile WebViews. However, it has a mobile sibling, Mint UI, to tackle the issue of hybrid app development.

Element UI is easier to use and more flexible compared to other libraries. It also has comprehensive English documentation and an international chat.

#2. Vue CLI

The CLI tool enables operations with the code and system’s internals to execute the command and simplify the project’s setting-up (think of JS build step for contrast).

Alongside the Vue CLI default set, there’s a bit more to it including such web development tools as Babel, PWA, TypeScript, ESLint, and unit testing & end-to-end testing. With no ejection needed, it keeps your project up-to-date for long stretches. It’s boilerplate and scaffolding, not a drop on the replacement for the specific needs, which also means some defaults cannot be undone.

#3. Vuetify

Vuetify is a semantic and function-rich Vue component library encapsulating many good and complex solutions. It helps to get a better understanding of what the Vue concept is and offers clean and reusable beautifully crafted components to perfect and streamline app development.

Vuetify’s support is tremendous as it’s being maintained by an entire team of developers and funded via Open Collective and Patreon. Unleashing a set of tools such as Webpack loader, opinionated Eslint config, and more, you can easily embed it in your app via Nuxt and Vue CLI plugins.

#4. Vue Injector

Vue Injector is a free open-source DI (dependency injection) library for Vue. Its key features comprise the implementation of dependency injection pattern which Vue lacks by default, using decorators for convenient operation, injected services construction, accessibility of Vue app from service, etc. 

Vue Injector is a great tool when it comes to convenience while data transfer, building service and a service factory, event bus implementation, and beefing up the app’s efficiency, performance, and flexibility.

#5. Mint UI

Mint UI offers a variety of JS and CSS components for creating mobile apps with iOS-like style and web pages in the same style. Since Vue.js follows an efficient component-based approach, Mint UI is a lightweight library based on the JS compiler.

With the help of CSS3 animation handling, Mint UI minimizes reflow and repaint in the app pages. Hence, there’s a better user experience and smooth interaction even on mobile devices.

#6. Keen UI

Inspired by Material Design, Keen UI is a Vue UI library perfect for introducing interactive features to your ready-made app. However, since it’s not a CSS framework, it doesn’t have typography styles, a grid system, etc. Before using this library, make sure that CSS resets are applied to your website (most CSS frameworks already include it).

Keen UI goes with an intuitively comprehensible API, such features as form inputs and reacting to use them, and more.

#7. Quasar

Source: openbase.io

Quasar is a universal open-source framework. It can use one source code for building both mobile (iOS & Android), desktop, and web applications. If you’re seeking to reduce the time spent on coding and get the best of app performance, Quasar is inch-perfect.

Quasar strives to support the popular technologies out-of-the-box and delivers a state-of-the-art UI following Material Guidelines. This library is extendable (JS), easily customizable (CSS), has TypeScript support, well-maintained with regular updates, and handles the entire development experience, including app splash screens and icons.

#8. iView

IView is a high-quality UI components library built on Vue.js 2.0. It has friendly and flexible APIs, rich functions, uses .vue file development mode, and is built on npm, webpack, and babel.

IView might be a trustworthy alternative to Element UI as it provides an extensive range of components and some tools to make working with them a breeze, supports Typescript, and the official admin panel template. In case you opt for SASS rather than LESS, iView is your match.

#9. Vue Router

Vue.js has many features to create reusable web components. Routing is one of them. As the official router library for Vue, Vue Router helps to build SPAs up and running with different routes via the integration with Vue core. The SPAs are in common need now, so you can use Vue Router if you need to sync URLs to views.

Its key features include view transition effects based on Vue’s transition system, nested route/view mapping, route params, wildcards, query, thorough navigation control, and so much more.

#10. Bootstrap Vue

Source: openbase.io

With automated WAI-ARIA accessibility markup, BootstrapVue offers one of the most comprehensive implementations of Bootstrap v4 for Vue 2.6+. It entails over 45 plugins and 85 components, various directives, and over 1000 icons.

What’s more, BootstrapVue is the community’s most frequent recommendation. As you can see from the picture above, its downloads hit 310K per week, which is the highest rate among all other Vue UI libraries. Using BootstrapVue, you don’t have to struggle to mix jQuery and Vue as all its components were written with Vue. 

Wrapping Up

Every component library exists to enhance the capacities of Vue, provide a unique way of handling the issue, boost the app’s functionality and ensure high performance, be budget-friendly, and, overall, make the app development seamless, fast, and bugs-free. 

Summing up all the ideas and users’ feedback, Vuetify, Quasar, and BootstrapVue win in the nomination ‘Users choice’. Element UI and iView are extensive and desktop-oriented. Vue Router and Vue Injector are the most easy-get-into libraries, encapsulating unique features.

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