Chakra UI is a modern, accessible, and highly customizable component library for React. It provides a comprehensive set of pre-styled components designed to accelerate the development process. Its core philosophy centers on providing an excellent developer experience, ensuring design consistency through a powerful theming system, and baking in accessibility from the ground up.
This guide covers everything you need to know about Chakra UI, from its fundamental styling system and customization capabilities to its performance characteristics and compatibility with other libraries.
Chakra UI is a complete component library, meaning it comes with pre-styled components and is not a "headless" or unstyled library like Radix UI. Its architecture is self-contained; it does not rely on external primitive libraries like Radix UI. Instead, Chakra's team implemented all the low-level behaviors, accessibility features (like focus traps and keyboard navigation), and state management hooks (like useDisclosure) from scratch.
The primary way to style components in Chakra UI is through style props directly in your JSX. This allows you to write styles that are collocated with your components in an intuitive way.