Log in to like this post! Best 9 Angular Component Libraries in 2023 Katie Mikova / Friday, May 19, 2023 Many applications bump into a stack of similar challenges, like providing an intuitive and consistent user interface (UI), handling or rendering large data sets, allowing seamless data integration, and communicating with other systems using APIs. And as it appears, Angular is a top framework that enables developers to tackle these challenges with the help of extended features and capabilities packed in different UI libraries. But with so many out there, how can you know which is the best Angular component library? We’ve gathered the best 9. Article highlights: The successful Angular story What is an Angular component library The best 9 Angular libraries Angular Material NG Bootstrap NGX-Bootstrap PrimeNG ApexCharts Nebular Clarity Core UI Ignite UI for Angular Conclusion The Successful Angular Story Today, more than 300,000 websites are built using Angular technology. And this is mainly because some of the main advantages of using Angular are its tooling, best practices, building blocks, and Design patterns. Tooling - like CLI, AOT compiler, Language service, Schematics, Code Testing, and DevTools. Best practices like built-in protections against common web application vulnerabilities and attacks such as cross-site scripting attacks, Accessibility, Site Routing, SPA, Lazy loading, and Server-side rendering. Building blocks and Design patterns - usage of Angular components, directives, templates, and Dependency injection. 3rd party libraries are added on top of the actual framework. Also, development teams are equipped with reusable and easily accessible Angular UI components, which promise swift development processes and results that respond to modern-day expectations and requirements. Angular becomes a game changer in the dynamic app development world by enabling you to use HTML as a base template language and then expand its syntax to create components much faster. And with things like seamless data binding and dependency injection features, the amount of code you need to write is reduced significantly. No surprise, then, that Angular is one of the most popular app development frameworks. What Is an Angular Component Library? An Angular component library is a package with a collection of ready-to-use UI components for developing consistent, innovative, and dynamic web solutions. These libraries extend the base features of Angular. Many applications need to solve the same general problems, such as presenting a unified user interface, presenting data, and allowing data entry. Developers can create general solutions for particular domains that can be adapted for reuse in different applications. Typically, the components of these libraries are designed to be highly customizable and reusable, allowing you to quickly adapt buttons, forms, navigation menus, and others to your specific needs, app logic, and project requirements. The Best 9 Angular Component Libraries To Consider for Your Project If you’ve already solved the Build vs. Buy Component Library dilemma by deciding to buy one, the next step is to make an informed decision. To make the following list of Angular UI library examples most insightful and useful for you before starting your next app, we based the research on critical factors like the range of features each library offers; documentation, installation instructions, and demos; the size and the type of activity of the community behind these Angular component libraries (blogs, forums, YouTube tutorials, GitHub, etc.); compatibility with other tools like low-code platforms, design systems, testing tools, and more; licensing; maintenance, updates, plus how well the library is built around responsiveness in terms of user feedback and issues. Angular Material Previously known as Material2, Google developed the official UI component library based on Angular and TypeScript. It delivers different pre-built UI components that apply common interaction patterns matching the Material Design guidelines. Still, developers can customize the look and feel of the Angular Material components to match app requirements and purposes. The components it packs: Autocomplete, Datepicker, Paginator, Stepper, Tabs, Buttons, Cards, Chips, Dialogs, Icons. Inputs, Lists, Menus, Toolbars, Tooltips, Typography, Tables, Snackbar, Sliders, Selects. Best Things It Offers/Does: Customizable navigation menus, buttons, forms, dialog boxes, and more. Navigation, virtual scrolling. Simple and straightforward APIs. Supports design and usability best practices and consistency across various platforms. Rich and thorough documentation. Leverages the built-in directives and services of the framework. The Downside: Its components are based on the Material Design standard (which is advantageous and disadvantageous at the same time). An advantage because visual changes might be introduced without supporting former alternatives. A disadvantage because it stays up to date with the latest web standards. Lack of robust components like Grids and Charts. Lack of rich functionalities of the existing components. They follow a minimalistic functionality approach. NG Bootstrap This lightweight Angular UI library is built using TypeScript entirely and contains a collection of Angular directives and widgets. The components it packs: Forms, Navigation Menus, Powerful Grids, Alert, Buttons, Dropdown, Typehead, Modals. Best Things It Offers/Does: Provides components and design patterns that developers are already familiar with, so there’s no steep learning curve. Expands the Bootstrap components’ capabilities. With support for accessibility features, including the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA). Extremely good Modal component for creating highly customizable and configurable modal dialogs. The Downside: Requires Bootstrap and Angular know-how to use the NG Bootstrap library. With dependency on Bootstrap 4 CSS. Lack of components - no Grid or visual components like Charts. NGX-Bootstrap NGX-Bootstrap may sound almost the same as the previous UI library, but it is a completely different open-source project that is built on AngularJS. It extends the component capabilities of Bootstrap and provides more advanced customization options for component styling. The components it packs: Alerts, Accordion, Buttons, Carousel, Collapse, Datepicker, Dropdown, Modals, Pagination, Popover, Progressbar, Rating, Sortable, Tabs, Timepicker, Tooltip, Typehead. Best Things It Offers/Does: Components that are designed to be modular, flexible, and adaptable. Retain excellent performance on both mobile and desktop. You can easily apply custom templates and styles. The Downside: Doesn’t contain all the core components of Bootstrap. It may require a certain level of expertise to implement effectively. The larger size of ngx-bootstrap can increase the size of the app that is being built. Poor maintainability and lack of regular releases. PrimeNG With 7,300+ GitHub stars and 296,000 weekly NPM downloads, PrimeNG is another top component library for Angular that we rank among the best ones. Open-source widgets, professionally designed ready-to-use templates, and quick installation make this library a great choice. The components it packs: Charts, Forms, Icons, Calendars, Chips. Dropdown, Knob, KeyFilter, Editor, Listbox, SelectButton, TreeSelect, Rating, RadioButton, Slider, etc. Best Things It Offers/Does: A pack of 80+ different components that are easy to implement. It has a theme designer with which you can create your own themes. Ability to choose from pre-built, touch-optimized Flat and Material themes. Customizable native Angular CLI. Seamless integration using Angular’s lifecycle hooks and built-in directives. Great documentation/ API docs and live samples. The Downside: Using it can become too overwhelming and complex due to too many features and components. With trickier outputs that may require some extra programming to emit an event from a nested component manually. Fails to provide some basic events. Templating isn’t available on every component you would normally expect. ApexCharts An expert JavaScript charting library that has recently started developing grids as well. It helps you build interactive data visualizations with a simple API and 100+ ready-to-use samples. It includes over a dozen chart types that deliver beautiful, responsive visualizations in your apps and dashboards. The components it packs: Charts, Grids. Best Things It Offers/Does: A MIT-licensed, open-source project that can be used in commercial and non-commercial projects. Different chart features like tooltips, interactivity, animations, and more. You can define your own color palette or choose a pre-defined one as a quicker solution. No registration is needed. With 100+ samples. The Downside: Limited number of chart types. Limited number of grids. Not a complete Angular UI kit. Nebular It is an Angular UI component library with over 40 UI components in four customizable themes (Default, Dark, Cosmic, and Corporate). At its core, it uses the Eva design system in implementation. The primary goal of this kit is to focus on the adaptability and design of your application. An interesting fact, it was recognized at the prestigious AngularConnect 2018. The components it packs: Stepper, Lists, Sidebar, Menu, Tabs, Layouts, Cards, Lists, Accordion, Form Elements, Data Tables, Modals, etc. Best Things It Offers/Does: No third-party dependencies. Great for its local support. Ready to use admin dashboard – ngx-admin. Free distribution of its source code thanks to the MIT license. With Authentication layers and Security modules that control more-granular access to specific resources. Delivers assets for teams that work with Sketch or Figma and want to start the design-dev process from this point. There are things like Chat UI, Badge, and more extra components. The Downside: Limited customization option. Some may find it difficult to learn and get used to it. Clarity This one is built and maintained by VMware and combines UX guidelines, Figma libraries, HTML/CSS framework, and a set of data-bound Angular components. It works with a card-based design, providing a flexible and modular system with easy-to-use card components. The components it packs: Accordion, Badges, Buttons, Input Fields, Select Boxes, Data Grid, Date Picker, Forms, Header, Alerts, Dropdowns, Labels, Lists, Stack View, Spinners, and more. Best Things It Offers/Does: Brings consistency thanks to the shared visual language that is used across all components. Extensive documentation with tutorials, guides, and API references. The Downside: Offers just the most common components. The focus is on UX. Some may find the cards concept a bit confusing or incomplete for their purposes. Works with Clarity Design system, which is a bit peculiar as you might not be very fond of the style. There are no other themes available. Works more like an enterprise-focused design system. Core UI Core UI works as an Angular admin dashboard template and UI library, delivering beautifully handcrafted UI controls. It is a MIT-licensed open-source project and is free to use. The components it packs: Footer, Buttons, Accordion, Alert, Modal, Navbar, Tooltip, Toast, Header, Image, Callout, Cards, Collapse, Dropdown, Breadcrumb, and a few more. Best Things It Offers/Does: Offers various themes to cover different requirements. With a ready-to-use environment. Provides enterprise-grade support. Compatibility with Bootstrap. Lots of input field styles and templates. The Downside: Customization options may not serve all purposes. Primarily used for building dashboards. With a limited set of features. Maintaining and developing new features is only sustainable with proper financial backing. It is not updated frequently. Ignite UI for Angular A complete Angular components library of Angular-native UI components, including the fastest Angular data grid and 60+ high-performance Angular charts! Compatible with Angular 15 and built to be enterprise-grade. The components it packs: Pivot Grid, Hierarchical Grid, Tree Grid, Data Grid, Charts, Gauge, Calendar, Dialog, Splitter, Treemap, DatePicker, Combo, Spreadsheet, Icon, Drop Down, Paginator, and a lot more. Best Things It Offers/Does: Most robust Grid component that can handle unlimited rows and columns of data. CLI tools that provide different project templates. Data analysis using Dock Manager. Provides access to custom templates and real-time data updates. Features an intuitive API for easy theming and branding. Simplified data entry and a faster way to bind to data with minimal code. Improved row selection with features such as multi-click use of tabs. Enables you to build expressive dashboards and render millions of data points. Rich chart components with every common category chart type, plus Google Finance and Yahoo Finance charts and more. Native Angular Material components are written for optimal file size. Bootstrap support plus custom themes for complete control. 100% transparency on GitHub. Different subscription plans. The Downside: Customer support is 24x5. It isn’t free to use (except for the Grid and Charts). Try Ignite UI for Angular Some Conclusive Extra-Thoughts… In conclusion, what does the best Angular Ui library offer to development teams? We’ve identified these fundamental benefits that comprehensive and modern Angular component libraries deliver to developers, including: Reusability A comprehensive Angular component library allows for component reusability. This way, you don’t have to recreate a component from scratch again and again. Instead, you can easily reuse pre-built components in different projects, saving time and resources and achieving consistency throughout the app. Scalability The best component library for Angular can also help you scale projects faster and more efficiently. As the app becomes more complex, you can easily add new components to the library without breaking existing functionalities. Customization options You may be working on different projects, so having the freedom to fine-tune things like themes and styles is crucial in making an app distinguishable and achieving a better user experience (UX). You also align UI components with the branding and the design language behind the Angular app.