shadcn/ui is great! But what if...

Shadcn/ui is great, components are good-looking, easy to setup and customize, and everyone likes it… BUT, as everything, it has some downsides.

Most of the reviews are 100% positive, but I think it’s also worth mentioning what are the tradeoffs in order to make an informed decision before adopting a tool.

After using it for a few months, these are my thoughts.
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[kieronwiltshire]

If you have an issue with a component, you can literally re-install the component via the cli, get the latest version and boom, you're good.

[GatoNordico]

I think it depends on who’s the intended user. I would say shadcn is a great starting point for someone who wants to have the flexibility to modify their ui components. And as you highlighted this flexibility comes with a cost, which in this case is not monetary…

[angstrom]

"Dependency Hell" Thanks for pointing this out.

[hubcio]

The aforementioned arguments are valid, but imo they're just small caveats. One point about big codebases is a good thing to consider but shadcn is still better then a component library. What you trade off with shad you'll pay when fighting against a library or hacking it to do something that it was not designed to do.

[sid]

Thanks for mentioning this, it has been very valuable for making my decision (I will stick with JoyUI).

[trangcongthanh]

0:42 The ownership of the code is the best feature of shadcn/ui. I rather try to resolve the problem by myself than create issue, wait author/contributor verify the issue, fix it, then release it. I even created the PR to fix the bug, but it never got merge. Or got merge but never released. In the end of the day, I need to maintain a fork of the library by myself. Is it less work compare to maintain shadcn/ui components?
2:48 You can config the tsserver to ignore some pattern from auto/suggest import [])
Yes, upgrade deps for long run project is always a pain.

[Alex-bcxe]

I actually like to be able to customize my components easily

[smithrockford-dvnb]

The problem is that all other libraries (MUI, next-ui, etc) all look bad by comparison. Vercel has mastered the look, and shadcn/ui is the only one that looks close.

[wadoudazer]

What about solution, i hate the way chakra material and mantine works with classic css or css in js (emotion) i really like tailwind

[emmanuelxs]

I think we can come up with a solution

[hakuna_matata_hakuna]

am now afraid of updaing the depndancies because all the radix ones wil update and something will bvreak . parkui better imo snec they only use ark ui which they also maintain, it also workswith solid ans sveltte

[chirkov]

You spend 8 minutes talking about the only bug in the shadcn. Every library has bugs. Shadcn and radix are written beautifully

[sourabhsingh]

the developer of shadcn must be his classmate that's why he is just telling us what we already know and we don't care about those things 🤣🤣

[austincodes]

If there is a problem with shadcn you can make a pull request. If you are using MUI are forced to fix a bunch of random breaking changes because you wanted a newer version for a single component or bug fix. MUI and things it are terrible

[MrPkmonster]

Hello, could your suggest alternative library instead of shadcn ? Thank you

[cb]

There are downsides but… compared to what?

[nasko]

A lot of the components (or primitives whatever) also don't work together. Let's say you want to insert a DropdownMenu inside a NavigationMenu. Everything spazzes out and the component starts getting rerendered constantly. Yeah, it can be annoying and time-consuming to write your own components but after spending days trying to stitch up a dropdown multi-nested navigation from shadCN components and failing, I'd say I would've been better off doing it from scratch.

[s_the_first]

"if your component has a problem, it is... YOUR problem". Lol. You are correct. But this is a good thing. Funny tho...