Headless UI vs. JavaScript vs. Plate vs. React Aria 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.

​Plate is a rich-text editor framework for React, designed to simplify complex text editing needs. Built with Slate.js and TypeScript, it offers a highly customizable and extensible editing experience. Plate provides a wide range of plugin packages that enhance the behavior, hooks, serialization, normalization, and other features of the editor. These plugins are "headless," meaning they are unstyled by default, allowing developers to style them as needed. It includes state management with Zustand stores, custom hotkeys, API methods, and transforms accessible through editor.api and editor.transforms. Plate also offers unstyled and accessible components based on Radix UI, serving as the foundation for building high-quality design systems. For those seeking a visually appealing interface, Plate provides pre-built styled components based on shadcn/ui, which can be customized to create a unique, accessible, and visually pleasing user interface.