Alexis Kestler
Hi friend! As an experienced Angular developer, I want to provide you with an in-depth look at UI libraries for Angular. A UI library can take your Angular application‘s user experience to the next level. In this guide, I‘ll share my insights on:
- What Angular UI libraries are
- Why they are so valuable for UX
- 10 top Angular UI libraries
- Key factors in choosing a library
- Using multiple libraries together
Let‘s get started!
What are Angular UI Libraries?
Angular UI libraries are collections of reusable UI components for Angular applications. They provide common UI elements like buttons, menus, modals, tables, etc. as Angular directives and components to easily integrate into your app.
For example, say you need to add a sidebar menu to your Angular site. You can build it from scratch with HTML/CSS/JS. Or, use a pre-built menu component from a UI library and get it working with just a few lines of code!
The components encapsulate the UI logic, markup, styles and behaviors. This saves us developers lots of time compared to building UIs from the ground up.
Why Angular UI Libraries are Essential for UX
Integrating a robust Angular UI library has so many benefits for your app‘s user experience:
Save Development Time
UI libraries allow us to develop apps much faster by leveraging pre-built components for common UI tasks.
According to surveys by StackOverflow and State of JS, at least 80% of developers use UI libraries and this number keeps rising.
With UI libraries, we focus less on styling buttons or building form elements, and more on the app‘s core features.
Consistent Look and Feel
Using components from a single UI library results in a consistent user experience.
For example, all modal dialogs will have the same style and animations. Data tables will have consistent row striping and hover effects.
This consistency improves intuitive navigation and flows for users.
Accessibility
Reputable UI libraries ensure components are accessible to all users. Features like ARIA roles, keyboard navigation, labels and alt text are built-in.
This compliance with accessibility standards benefits users relying on assistive devices.
Optimized for Performance
Popular UI libraries optimize components for performance. Features like onPush change detection, Ahead-of-Time compilation, tree-shaking, and code splitting help improve rendering speed.
For example, tests by the ngx-bootstrap team showed performance gains of 75% over custom components:
Responsive Design
UI libraries design components for use across desktop and mobile experiences.
Features like CSS grid/flexbox, overlays, and responsive API help adapt interfaces across device sizes.
This means we build mobile flexibility right into our Angular apps.
Better Testing
Standardized components make writing unit and end-to-end tests easier. We can test the UI library components once and reuse across apps.
Overall, integrating a robust Angular UI library improves development velocity, UX quality and consistency, accessibility, performance, responsiveness and testing.
Top 10 Angular UI Libraries
There are many great Angular UI libraries out there. I‘ve compiled reviews of the top 10 options based on popularity, features, and support:
1. Angular Material
Angular Material is a very popular component library built and supported by Google‘s Angular team. It features over 30 responsive UI components following Google‘s Material Design spec.
The tight integration with Angular makes it seamless to use Angular Material. The theming system lets us customize components to our branding needs.
Over 17,000 GitHub projects actively use Angular Material indicating its widespread adoption.
2. ngx-bootstrap
ngx-bootstrap provides native Angular implementations of Bootstrap‘s markup and CSS. This makes it easy to build responsive, mobile-friendly apps that look great out of the box.
ngx-bootstrap is used in over 13,000 projects and has a very active open source community behind it. Their components outperform stock Bootstrap components by 50-75% based on tests.
3. PrimeNG
PrimeNG is an open source library with 90+ UI components for Angular. The components provide common interactions like datagrids, charts, editors, trees and more.
PrimeNG has been around since 2016 and is used by over 500,000 developers according to surveys. The theming engine makes customizing its look and feel flexible.
4. Clarity
Clarity is an open source Angular library sponsored by VMWare. It takes a modular approach with dozens of enterprise-focused components like datasheets, stack viewers, alerts and more.
Clarity has over 36k GitHub stars indicating strong community adoption. The detailed documentation and guides make it easy to integrate Clarity.
5. Nebular
Nebular contains 40+ Angular components with a focus on beautiful UI and theming capabilities. Their components come in different categories like navigation, layout, data entry and data display.
Nebular is used by over 1,500 sites according to BuiltWith. It has custom CSS property support for flexible theming.
6. Kendo UI
Kendo UI offers a robust commercial UI library for Angular featuring 60+ enterprise-ready components. The polished components speed up building LOB apps.
Kendo UI for Angular provides Angular Universal support, Material themes and a high performance grid component. It‘s used by companies like UPS, Progressive, and Nordstrom.
7. Ant Design
Ant Design is an elegant, enterprise-class UI library for Angular with 60+ pre-built components. It is a port of Ant Design from React to Angular by community members.
Ant Design Angular components help build complex UIs for internal business apps quickly and from consistent building blocks.
8. Fabric
Fabric is Microsoft‘s open source front-end library containing robust accessibility-focused components for Angular.
Fabric features familiar Office styling for enterprise apps. Fabric is used in Microsoft Azure portal and many internal tools.
9. Igx
The Ignite UI for Angular is a premium library for complex line of business apps with 65+ components like grids, excel and financial charting.
Igx has high-performance datagrids that can handle millions of rows of data. The polished components help build robust enterprise apps.
10. Onsen UI
Onsen UI provides UI components tailored for hybrid mobile apps. It has Angular and React flavors with components focused on mobile UX patterns.
Onsen UI is open source and lets us build mobile apps with native feel using Web Components. It powers over 100,000 hybrid mobile apps.
As you can see there are many great options! Let‘s now discuss how to select the right one.
How to Select an Angular UI Library
With so many quality Angular UI libraries, here are some key factors I consider when choosing one:
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App Type: Will you build a web app, mobile app or universal app? Some libraries are more focused on mobile or universal rendering.
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Complexity: If building an enterprise-scale app, ensure the library has been optimized for performance and scale. Lightweight libraries may suffice for simpler apps.
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Components: Carefully evaluate if the library has the exact components and features your app requires. Compare advanced components like data grids, schedulers, trees etc.
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Customization: How flexible is theming/customization support? Can the styles be adapted to your brand design needs?
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Budget: Some exceptional commercial libraries have premium themes, features and support. But many open source libraries also provide robust components.
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Developer Experience: Look for comprehensive documentation, guides, API reference and demos to help your team get productive quickly.
Also considerfactors like project activity, community size, frequency of releases, and corporate backing.
I suggest narrowing down 2-3 libraries that closely fit your needs. Build some prototypes with each to make a hands-on assessment before deciding.
Using Multiple UI Libraries
In most cases, I recommend using a single consistent UI library for the entire Angular application. This results in a coherent user experience.
However, there are some cases where using multiple libraries together makes sense:
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Complementing your main library with additional niche components like graphs, calendars etc from another library.
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Using different libraries for different application areas. For example, Ant Design for admin screens and Material for customer screens.
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Slowly migrating components from one library to another over time for a piecemeal upgrade.
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Mixing some custom components with library components.
When using multiple libraries, take care with component styles and dependencies to avoid conflicts. Leverage tree-shaking and secondary entry points so only needed code gets bundled.
Wrap Up
Hope this overview gives you a better understanding of Angular UI libraries and how they can help enhance your app‘s user experience.
Many excellent libraries like Angular Material, PrimeNG, Clarity and others provide robust, pre-built components to speed up development.
Carefully consider factors like app type, complexity, customization needs and developer experience when choosing a library.
Integrating components from UI libraries allows us to focus less on UI plumbing and more on crafting incredible user experiences! Let me know if you have any other questions.
