Ariakit vs. Headless UI vs. JavaScript vs. React Spectrum Comparison Chart

​Headless UI is a library of completely unstyled, fully accessible UI components designed to integrate seamlessly with Tailwind CSS. It offers a range of components for both React and Vue. These components are built with accessibility in mind, adhering to WAI-ARIA design patterns and providing full keyboard navigation support. Because they are unstyled by default, developers have complete control over the look and feel, allowing for easy customization to match any design system. Headless UI components expose state information through data attributes and render props, enabling developers to conditionally apply styles based on component states such as focus, open, selected, or disabled. This approach ensures that the components are both flexible and accessible, making them suitable for building custom, high-quality user interfaces. With Headless UI, developers can create complex UI elements like modals, dropdowns, and tabs without sacrificing accessibility or design flexibility.

​React Spectrum is a React implementation of Spectrum, Adobe’s design system. It provides components that are adaptive to interactions and screen sizes across devices, and includes full screen reader and keyboard navigation support for accessibility. React Spectrum components are designed to work with mouse, touch, and keyboard interactions. They’re built with responsive design principles to deliver a great experience, no matter the device. React Spectrum includes automatic support for dark and light modes based on operating system settings. React Spectrum components are designed to support over 30 languages, including support for right-to-left languages, date and number formatting, and more. It offers a comprehensive set of components, including buttons, pickers, collections, date and time inputs, color pickers, forms, navigation elements, overlays, status indicators, and content components.