Angular is an open-source JavaScript framework built using TypeScript and optimized for developing single-page web applications. It’s well-known for its versatility, allowing developers to concentrate on features and functionality. Adding component libraries to the mix adds another layer of efficiency, improving development productivity and the overall quality of your applications.
However, choosing the best library for your project can be difficult with so many available options. This article examines some of the most useful Angular component libraries, how they work, and how you can integrate each of them into your Angular application.
Why Use a Component Library?
Whether you build them yourself or adopt third-party libraries, components make up the foundation of Angular applications. Each component relies on a template for its HTML and CSS elements and TypeScript code that controls its behavior.
The key benefit of component libraries is that they provide reusable, pre-built UI components, reducing the need for custom code and helping developers get applications up and running quickly.
Angular’s approach to components can also enhance cross-team cooperation between programmers who may be writing TypeScript code and web designers who provide the HTML for the templates.
Libraries of components are typically added to Angular projects using the Node.js npm Node Package Manager or using Angular’s own command line interface (CLI).
What Makes a Good Component Library?
The component libraries on our list have been selected based on several criteria:
- They provide a comprehensive set of UI components, making it easy for developers to quickly create beautiful and functional applications.
- They are easy to use and integrate with popular web development frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue.
- They offer good documentation and support, ensuring developers can get help when needed.
- They’re actively maintained and updated, ensuring they stay up to speed with the latest web technologies and security standards.
9 Nifty Angular Component Libraries
Now let’s take a closer look at our picks.
1. Angular Material
Angular Material is the official Angular component library, offering a comprehensive UI collection while keeping up to date with the latest Angular features and API changes. It also offers built-in accessibility support, generating markup to enable keyboard navigation and guide assistive technologies like screen readers.
How it works: Angular Material leverages Angular’s built-in directives and services to provide a set of data-bound and performant components on top of Angular, making it easy to add interactivity to web applications.
Where it excels: Angular Material excels at providing pre-built UI components that follow Material Design guidelines. It offers a set of well-designed and customizable UI components that can be integrated into Angular applications easily. These components include navigation menus, buttons, forms, dialog boxes, and more.
For example, if you want to add a button component to your application, you can simply use the mat-button directive and customize it as needed.
Here’s an example code snippet:
<button mat-button color="primary">Click me!</button>This code will generate a button component with the primary color scheme. You can further customize the button by adding event handlers, changing the text, and the look of the icon.
2. NG-Bootstrap
NG-Bootstrap is an open-source library built on top of Bootstrap CSS, providing components and design patterns that many developers are already familiar with. This reduces the learning curve for new projects, making it a reliable choice for building Angular applications quickly and efficiently.
How it works: NG-Bootstrap extends the capabilities of Bootstrap components by allowing developers to use them as Angular directives, with two-way data binding and other Angular-specific features. This makes it easy for developers to create responsive, mobile-friendly web applications that work seamlessly with Angular.
Where it excels: One of the key strengths of NG-Bootstrap is its support for accessibility features, including the W3Cs specifications for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA), making it easier for developers to create applications that can be used by people with disabilities. NG-Bootstrap also excels in the area of modal dialogs. With the ng-bootstrap Modal component, developers can easily create modal dialogs with customizable options such as size, backdrop, and keyboard support.
Here’s an example of how to create a basic modal dialog using NG-Bootstrap:
<ng-template #content let-modal>
<div class="modal-header">
<h4 class="modal-title">Modal title</h4>
<button type="button" class="close" aria-label="Close" (click)="modal.dismiss('Cross click')">
<span aria-hidden="true">×</span>
</button>
</div>
<div class="modal-body">
<p>Modal body text goes here.</p>
</div>
<div class="modal-footer">
<button type="button" class="btn btn-secondary" (click)="modal.close('Close click')">Close</button>
</div>
</ng-template>
<button class="btn btn-primary" (click)="open(content)">Launch demo modal</button>In this example, the ng-template element contains the content for the modal dialog, including the header, body, and footer. The button element at the end of the code snippet triggers the opening of the modal when clicked. The open() method is used to display the modal and takes the ng-template element as its argument.
3. Clarity
Clarity is an open-source library that uses a shared visual language across its components to provide a consistent, intuitive UI. It’s also extensively documented, with numerous guides, tutorials, and API references, making it easy to learn and use.
How it works: The Clarity design system is based on the concept of “cards,” which are used to group related content. Cards are used to represent individual pieces of content in a structured and organized way. Clarity provides a variety of card components that can present data in a variety of formats. These card components include headers, footers, and content sections, and can be easily customized with different styles and themes.
The cards can also be combined with other components — such as modals, dropdowns, and buttons — to create more complex UI designs. The overall goal of the card-based design is to provide a flexible and modular system for creating complex interfaces with ease.
Where it excels: Clarity’s extensive set of form controls is a definite strength. These controls include input fields, select boxes, radio buttons, and more. Clarity also offers a set of data visualizations, such as bar charts, line charts, and pie charts, to help display data in a clear and organized manner.
Here is an example of how to use the Clarity input field component in an HTML form:
<clr-input-container>
<label>Username</label>
<input clrInput placeholder="Enter your username">
</clr-input-container>This code will create a form input field with a label and placeholder text. The clr-input-container and clrInput directives are provided by the Clarity library and will style the input field accordingly.
4. Kendo UI
Kendo UI is a commercial library built with performance in mind, ensuring fast load times and a smooth user experience. It also provides themes and styling options to enhance the look and feel of your application, as well as extensive documentation and a dedicated support team.
How it works: Kendo UI uses techniques such as virtualization and lazy loading to ensure fast load times and a smooth user experience. This means that applications built with Kendo UI are fast and responsive, even when dealing with large datasets. Kendo UI also follows a modular architecture that enables developers to use only the components that they need, reducing the library’s size and improving performance.
Where it excels: Kendo UI is particularly suited for enterprise-level applications that require extensive data management and complex user interactions. Its grid component, for instance, supports features like filtering, sorting, and grouping, allowing developers to present large datasets to users in a manageable way.
Here is a code snippet of how to create a simple Kendo UI grid in HTML:
<kendo-grid [data]="gridData">
<kendo-grid-column field="ProductID" title="Product ID" width="120"></kendo-grid-column>
<kendo-grid-column field="ProductName" title="Product Name" width="200"></kendo-grid-column>
<kendo-grid-column field="UnitPrice" title="Unit Price" width="120"></kendo-grid-column>
<kendo-grid-column field="UnitsInStock" title="Units In Stock" width="120"></kendo-grid-column>
</kendo-grid>This code will display a Kendo UI grid in your Angular application. You can customize the grid by passing various configuration options to the kendo-grid component.
5. PrimeNG
PrimeNG is an open-source library designed for ease of use and customization. It also includes advanced accessibility features and internationalization support, making it a great choice for global applications.
How it works: PrimeNG library provides a set of pre-built UI components that developers can easily integrate into their Angular applications. It uses Angular’s built-in directives and lifecycle hooks to provide seamless integration with the framework. It also supports various configuration options and customizations so developers can adapt components to their specific needs.
Where it excels: One of the key features of PrimeNG is its internationalization support. The library supports multiple languages and provides translation services for most of its components. This is achieved through the use of Angular’s localization framework and message files, which can be easily customized and updated.
To use internationalization in PrimeNG, you need to create translation files for the languages you want to support. These files should contain translations for all the components you want to use in your application. To enable internationalization in PrimeNG, you need to set the translate attribute of a component to true. The component will then use the translation files to display the text in the language of the user’s choice.
Here’s an example of how to use the p-calendar component with internationalization support in PrimeNG:
<p-calendar [(ngModel)]="date" [showIcon]="true" [readonlyInput]="true" [monthNavigator]="true" [yearNavigator]="true" yearRange="2000:2030" [locale]="en"></p-calendar>In this example, the p-calendar component has the translate attribute set to true, and the [locale] attribute is set to the language code for English (en). This ensures the calendar is displayed in English for users who have chosen that language.
6. Nebular
Nebular is a collection of more than 40 Angular UI components available in four customizable themes. The library, created by web development company Akveo, also comes with a user-authentication module and an ACL-based security module to control more-granular access to specific resources. Akveo can also get you started on your own admin dashboard application with the ngx-admin kit built using Nebular modules.
How it works: Nebular’s UI approach is based on the specifications of Akveo’s Eva Design System, for which it also provides assets for teams whose work begins with design tools like Sketch or Figma.
Designers working with Nebular’s CSS can generally refer to styling options semantically — such as the color variables primary, success, info, warning, and danger. But users can go beyond what Akveo has decided those represent by importing advanced styling customization as Sass files.
Nebular’s library of components includes layouts, cards, lists, accordions, navigation aids, form elements, data tables, modals, and overlays, plus widgets like spinners, date-pickers, and progress bars.
The metadata for a Nebular accordion component might look like this TypeScript:
import { Component, ChangeDetectionStrategy } from '@angular/core';
@Component({
selector: 'nb-accordion-demo',
templateUrl: './accordion-demo.component.html',
changeDetection: ChangeDetectionStrategy.OnPush,
})
export class AccordionDemoComponent {}And its template might look like this:
<nb-accordion>
<nb-accordion-item>
<nb-accordion-item-header>First Item Heading</nb-accordion-item-header>
<nb-accordion-item-body>
Toggled content for First Item.
</nb-accordion-item-body>
</nb-accordion-item>
<nb-accordion-item>
<nb-accordion-item-header>Second Item Heading</nb-accordion-item-header>
<nb-accordion-item-body>
Toggled content for Second Item.
</nb-accordion-item-body>
</nb-accordion-item>
</nb-accordion>Where it excels: The Nebular library and the ngx-admin admin dashboard kit are free to use, so that’s a big plus for such a sophisticated collection of tools. The authentication and security modules reflect Akveo’s focus on those administration-panel components.
Nebular also has strong support for languages that read right-to-left (RTL). Users will find CSS markup to support RTL (and LTR) layouts, and methods — like getDirection() and setDirection() — to detect and change the layout direction at runtime.
7. NG-Lightning
NG-Lightning is an interesting addition to the component library lineup, being an Angular-flavored implementation of the Salesforce Lightning Design System (LDS). That system provides HTML and CSS elements — blueprints — and design guidelines for Salesforce developers using that platform’s Lightning framework. The key elements of LDS are reflected in this open-source collection of Angular widgets, including the HTML and CSS.
How it works: NG-Lightning has dependencies that set it apart from some of the other component libraries. In addition to being dependent on the official Angular Component Dev Kit, NG-Lightning applications link to the same CSS repositories used by Salesforce LDS. That CSS can be downloaded from the official Salesforce UX repository or linked through a CDN.
Still, the TypeScript-based approach to building views will be familiar to Angular developers. This example would kick off the metadata for the alert component shown above:
import { Component } from '@angular/core';
@Component({
selector: 'app-demo-alert-basic',
templateUrl: './basic.html',
})
export class DemoAlertBasic {
showTopAlert = false;
onClose(reason: string) {
console.log(`Closed by ${reason}`);
}
}The component template for that official NG-Lightning example is:
<div class="slds-notify_container">
<ngl-alert *ngIf="showTopAlert" variant="warning" iconName="warning" (close)="onClose($event); showTopAlert = false;">
<h2 class="slds-text-heading_small">
Your browser is outdated. Your Salesforce experience may be degraded.
<a href="javascript:void(0);">More Information</a>
</h2>
</ngl-alert>
</div>
<ngl-alert class="slds-theme_alert-texture" variant="offline" iconName="offline" (close)="onClose('click')">
<h2>You are in offline mode.<a href="javascript:void(0);">More Information</a></h2>
</ngl-alert>
<ngl-alert class="slds-m-top_small" variant="error">Your browser is currently not supported.</ngl-alert>
<button class="slds-m-top_medium" type="button" [disabled]="showTopAlert" nglButton (click)="showTopAlert = true">Show alert in container</button>Where it excels: Reflecting their grounding in the Salesforce LDS, NG-Lightning’s developers take web accessibility seriously. Dynamically generated interfaces that are the hallmark of frameworks like Angular can often be challenging for end users with visual or mobility disabilities. NG-Lightning adheres to the W3C’s ARIA specifications guidelines, generating web markup designed to support assistive technologies like screen readers.
8. Syncfusion UI
Syncfusion UI is a lightweight, modular library that allows developers to choose only the necessary components for their application and reduce the overall size of the final bundle. This makes it easy to maintain, extend, and update the library by adding new components or modifying existing ones without affecting the others.
How it works: When a page loads, the Syncfusion UI library initializes and creates the necessary components based on the markup and configuration options. For example, the grid component allows users to sort, filter, and group data, while the chart component can display data in a variety of formats, including line, bar, and pie charts.
The library also includes a set of utility functions and tools that can be used to simplify common tasks, such as data manipulation and validation. The library includes a data manager that can be used to work with complex data structures and a validation engine that can be used to validate user input.
Where it excels: Syncfusion provides a robust set of tools for customization and theming, enabling developers to quickly create a consistent and professional-looking UI. The library includes a powerful set of APIs and events that can be used to create custom functionality and interactivity, as well as support for popular data sources such as REST APIs, OData, and SignalR.
Here is an example of including a Syncfusion grid component in an Angular application:
<ejs-grid [dataSource]="data">
<e-columns>
<e-column field="OrderID" headerText="Order ID" textAlign="Right" width="120"></e-column>
<e-column field="CustomerID" headerText="Customer Name" width="150"></e-column>
<e-column field="Freight" headerText="Freight" textAlign="Right" format="C2" width="120"></e-column>
<e-column field="ShipCity" headerText="Ship City" width="150"></e-column>
</e-columns>
</ejs-grid>This code creates a simple grid that displays data from a data source. The dataSource property is set to the data to be displayed, and the e-columns element is used to define the columns in the grid. Each e-column element defines a column in the grid, including the field to display, the header text, and the column width. The example also demonstrates how to format the data displayed in the grid using the format attribute.
9. Onsen UI
Onsen UI is a popular open-source UI library for building hybrid and web mobile applications. It provides better seamless integration with popular frontend frameworks than other third-party libraries, making it easy to create high-quality, interactive UI with minimal effort.
How it works: Onsen UI is based on the Material Design philosophy of Google, which ensures that the UI of the application is both aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly. It provides an extensive set of built-in themes that can be applied to the components to enhance the look and feel of the application.
Where it excels: Onsen UI excels in its ease of use and ability to create cross-platform applications that look and feel like native apps. It provides a rich set of pre-designed UI components that are optimized for mobile devices and can be customized to fit the needs of the application. It also includes features such as FastClick support, which helps to remove delays in touch events, and lazy loading, which allows for quicker loading times of the application.
Here is an example code snippet showing how to create a simple button using Onsen UI:
<ons-button modifier="large--cta">Click me!</ons-button>This code will create a button with the text “Click me!” and the modifier class large--cta, which will change the appearance of the button to a larger size with a color that is suitable for a call-to-action button.
Summary
Component libraries are now widely accepted as standard practice in web development. Component libraries have helped Angular become one of the most popular and widely used frontend development frameworks by providing a convenient and efficient way to develop UI components.
The libraries above provide pre-built and customizable UI components that help developers create high-quality and consistent user interfaces with less effort. Ultimately, the choice of the library will depend on the project’s specific needs and the developer’s preferences.
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