Ant Design – the second most popular React UI framework

I've worked as a freelancer on a couple of projects that used Ant Design, and personally I hated it.

In one case I was working on a real estate platform, so I had to build a listing search page (similar to Zillow). This means you're rendering lots of little dots on the map, and on hover, each one will open a popover with the listing details.

Using Ant Design brought this page to a standstill - massive performance issues, we're talking >1 second between frames. Turns out, it was rendering a unique portal element for every dot on the page, regardless of whether it was open or not.

I tried hacking it a bit but eventually gave up, and just wrote my own portal component that simply replaced the portal content with whatever you hovered over. After that we were back to 60fps.

Who remembers the christmas easter egg fiasco? https://blog.shunliang.io/frontend/2018/12/25/the-ant-design...

Back in 2018, I worked on projects where we used Ant Design. At the time it was one of the best choices out there for a quick project, as it had all the standard components with a relatively good design out of the box. Since all the easter egg fiasco / css bloat I've avoided using it.

These days, there's just much better options such as shadcn/ui [1], chakra [2] or radix [3] which when paired with frameworks such as floating ui [4] are just much better.

[1]: https://ui.shadcn.com/ [2]: https://v2.chakra-ui.com/getting-started [3]: https://www.radix-ui.com/primitives/docs/overview/introducti... [4]: https://floating-ui.com/docs/getting-started

Isn't there any UI framework alternative for the web that doesn't use JavaScript or Typescript?

Something like DaisyUI but using other languages when needing interactivity.

Also, tested the DatePicker and it's examples with time is unusable on mobile, renders outside of the viewport without option of scrolling.

My favorite UI library is Blueprint (https://blueprintjs.com/docs/) by Palantir

But I wouldn't be averse to trying Ant again. Last time it was lacking something I needed but that was years ago. Might be time for another attempt :)

I used antd at a previous company and I thought it was very nice from a design standpoint with a good look out of the box.

Development could be a little clunky with some things difficult to customize, although I think that's gotten somewhat better. I also remember a few things having Chinese documentation but missing some English translations. Haven't used it for a few years so not sure if that has been more filled in or if there are more English speaking maintainers involved now.

Still think it looks nice visually overall.

I've worked with several react colleagues who have used this framework heavily, and have good things to say.

It's also been ported to Angular:

https://ng.ant.design/docs/introduce/en

Who remembers Ext JS? Ant is like that for reactive js kits. It's got pretty much everything. It certainly is useful for building internal products.

This has been my goto React UI framework for a number of years now - and has helped me deliver a number of projects, ranging in size from big to small. It’s consistent, well thought out, and both clients and users like it.

Most of the Antd components wrap `rc-[x]` components[0] with a stylish UI.

In the past we've found Antd doesn't play well with custom components, and can often have weird performance implications.

It was a decent way to get a nice UI up fast, but we quickly found a need to build custom components or go elsewhere.

Styling was also a bit of a pain iirc, though I believe things are better with Antd 4+.

At my new gig we use Tailwind + shadcn, plus an increasing number of GPT-generated one-off components :)

[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/rc-popover

I have been using https://mantine.dev/ very polished and also has a very extensive collection of surprisingly useful hooks. Surprising because, whenever I try to create my own, 90% of the time mantine already has it that i can just import.

How anyone finds this code maintainable is beyond me: https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design/blob/master/compone...

I've come across this library a lot but never used it. I did inherit a project that uses chakra-ui though and have very much enjoyed using it. This seems similar, has anyone used both and have a preference for one or the other?

I've been using this at work and it's been incredible for getting stuff shipped. My only complaint is that the forms stuff is very tedious to write. Otherwise it's a great framework

Which one is the most popular?

I tend to prefer MUI but I've been working on an inherited project with Ant and it's gotten a lot better. Years back I would run in to cases where docs and forum posts were in Chinese. These days that's not an issue.

Second most popular globally normalised for spikes in specific countries?

Just a quick bug report on iOS Safari, if any contributors come across this: The top carousel is more than a screen high when loading, and the "Hot" badge seems to be in the wrong place.

Discussion on a Show HN: from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13053137

Component libraries are the major reason I’m still using React.

It would be so much nicer using something like Elixir LiveView for the kind of apps I’m developing. But having to implement so many basic components from scratch just doesn’t make sense.

I mean I can fully see the downsides of introducing big 3rd dependencies into a codebase but not using them would be (in my opinion) a huge waste of time.

Isn’t this a problem for other people (that aren’t using component libraries) as well?

How can anyone be productive with non React/Vue stacks for that reason?

I’d really wish there would be other solutions (web components) so I hadn’t rely on React.

Opened the homepage on mobile and it craps out majorly. Horizontal scroll with some white space and weird floating graphics, content hidden by overflow, etc. Is this a joke?

Is this for companies that don’t have their own designers?

Ant Design is honestly excellent, we've used it at work for a few smaller React projects and it felt so much better than most of the other alternatives like Material UI

It's very batteries included, you don't even need to use any external form handling library