Best Angular UI Library for your project
Hello there! Welcome to another article of mine on how we can evaluate which UI library to be used for your next project.
Why did you choose Angular?
Probably because it’s a framework that offers almost everything you need in developing a front-end app and is popular for large-scale projects. It also allows a strict mode to improve maintainability. You also don’t mind going through the documentation unless you have experienced developers.
Why do you need to consider your UI library?
We tend to focus on creating elegant UIs with the aim of providing users the best experience. But, a large-scale project (I believe yours is if you’re using Angular in the first place) should not be lagging because of a library. In order to maximize productivity and performance, it is vitally important to consider a reliable UI library. Another factor to make sure is that the library has advanced components thus, you wouldn’t need to use another library that may result in CSS or JS conflicts and extra efforts.
So what are the options?
1. Angular Material
Angular Material is a free and open-source library developed by the Angular team based on Google Material Design principles. Well, it might look like it’s complex at a glance but don’t judge a book by its cover right? I wasn’t a fan of Angular Material until I was introduced to an enterprise project.
This library provides a stunning responsive design and a range of internationalized components such as navigation patterns, form controls, buttons, and indicators that are adaptive to various browsers. Angular Material is a standalone library that can be used hand in hand with any other library without resulting in conflicts. The documentation is well-written and easy to read. Simplifies designs for workflow teams for rapid development with the least impact on performance. It is possible to customize components easily. Material APIs provide a guide on how to develop cross-platform apps as well.
Absence of certain out-of-the-box advanced components provided by Primeng such as column toggles, column reordering, in-cell editing, expandable rows, row and column grouping, CSV Export in the data table.
2. Primeng
If you’re looking for some rare UI component for your app, your chances of that being available in Primeng are high. PrimeNG is also a free and open-source Library developed. The first impression is really encouraging and it is very easy to use.
This customizable responsive library includes some infrequent modules such as captcha, color pickers, mega menu, organization chart, etc. Overall PrimeNG provides rich GUI features. PrimeNG is updated with every Angular version while the templates which are license-based, provide a simple and unique look and feel. PrimeNG PRO support is available for exclusive commercial support services.
3. Nebular
Nebular is a customizable Angular UI Library developed based on Eva Design System that provides enterprise-level components free for usage. Especially, Nebular includes Nebular Auth, Nebular Auth for Firebase, Nebular Security, Nebular Moment, Nebular date-fns, Admin dashboard starter kit, and 4 visual themes. It has rich documentation and satisfied community support,
4. ng-bootstrap
Well, we have all used this at least once in front-end designing right? ng-bootstrap is a UI library developed with Bootstrap 4 CSS in its widgets by the ng-bootstrap team. APIs are modified to be compatible with the Angular semantics. While it’s free and open-source, it uses lots of plain-looking UI widgets for applications.
Bootstrap components can be very basic and have not made use of Angular features like lazy loading. Because of the design provided, developers may need to spend some hours making sure the app looks good.
There are several more UI Libraries like sync-fusion and dev-extreme that are quite comprehensive and not free to the user, therefore, I’m not describing in this documentation.
Finally, let me put everything to a visual aspect.
According to my personal opinion, I’d consider using PrimeNG unless there’s any specific consideration of the performance where I’d recommend Angular Material. When using either of those libraries, investing a bit more effort in styling will result in super cool user-friendly UIs.
Thanks for reading. I write articles in my free time and love to share my experiences as a .NET Angular dev. See you in the next one!
