Angular is among the top-rated front-end Javascript frameworks with over 60,000 stars on GitHub and a huge community. It’s used for building a wide range of applications, including mobile apps, progressive web applications, single-page web applications, enterprise applications, and e-commerce sites. Software developers enjoy using Angular as it provides the best tools and practices for creating stable, feature-rich, and effective applications.
When building their apps, software developers use various Angular component libraries. They facilitate and speed up application development in many ways and help to create solutions that would satisfy the requirements of any business from any industry niche. Thus, the admin panels greatly simplify the process of creating a user interface for developers. For example, ngx-admin offers many ready-made components and sample pages for personal and commercial purposes.
In this article, we look into the best Angular component libraries you should use in your application development in 2021.
Why Use Angular Component Libraries?
Before we get to the most known and effective Angular component libraries, let’s find out what Angular component libraries are and why to use them in application development.
Angular component libraries are sets of various reusable components. Each component is a piece of code that represents a designed or styled part of a web application. This way, software developers create their web applications using building blocks, just like in a puzzle.
Each component is usually kept in a folder inside an application development project and can be used throughout this project more than once.
The components are picked up depending on a particular project needs and can be individually compiled by a software developer or downloaded as a public library distributed by a large IT company.
Why do software developers use component libraries in their AngularJS development projects? There are a number of reasons:
Architecture modularity
Breaking application front-end into reusable and modular UI blocks turns development in Angular into a pleasant and clear procedure. Software developers can use the same component in different parts of a project without rewriting a code from scratch.
Stylistic unity (design)
Components help to remove the variations of code logic and styling in different parts of a source code and make application design more consistent. Moreover, they make it easier to explain how a developed application will look and feel like. Software developers can simply gather all the components in one Storybook and present them to designers and stakeholders.
Maintenance
As all the components are gathered in one folder, it’s much easier to maintain and share them. Moreover, if a software developer implements any changes to a component, these modifications will be applied in all the project parts where the component was used.
Simple testing
Since components are well-organized and structured in application development projects, it’s much easier to create and run tests for them. Effective components testing ensures the stability of a project, making them more robust.
User-friendliness
Components are easy to customize and upgrade. Therefore, if software developers want to change something about an application design, they can do that within some clicks. The changes will be applied everywhere a component or a set of components were used.
Top 10 Angular Component Libraries One Must Use in 2021
Now, let’s have a look at the most popular and often used Angular component libraries that will continue to dominate web development in 2021.
1. NGX Bootstrap
Bootstrap is one of the most used Angular component libraries with 5.2k stars on GitHub. NGX Bootstrap is so popular as it’s flexible and has a wide range of styles and templates. Angular UI components work well on most desktop and mobile platforms and have a high level of performance.
Besides that NGX Bootstrap offers well-thought and clear documentation which is a great help for AngularJS beginners. It provides software developers with a set of guidelines that enhance the code, making it easier to read and maintain.
NGX Bootstrap components include:
- Collapse;
- Typeahead;
- Alers;
- Carousel;
- Accordion, and others.
2. Prime NG
Prime NG offers a great many components with a myriad of themes, a set of open-source widgets, and outstanding Angular CLI templates. The PrimeNG templates have a single dependency which makes them easy to maintain, while widgets, created by PrimeTek Informatics, provide the best UI experience to the end-users.
Prime NG components include:
- AutoComplete;
- ConfirmDialog;
- MultiSelect;
- DataView;
- BreadCrumb;
- FlexGrid;
- Doughnut;
- Filter Utils.
3. NG Bootstrap
NG Bootstrap is another popular Angular UI component library with 7.8k stars on GitHub. Being close by name to NGX Bootstrap, NG Bootstrap is a totally different project though the two are close by their function – using AngularJS without jQuery or any other third-party dependencies.
NG Bootstrap runs on Bootstrap 4 and requires AngularJS 5+, focuses on management work, and has keyboard navigation.
NG Bootstrap offers a great set of widgets, including:
- Modal;
- Rating;
- Tooltip;
- Tablet;
- Carousel;
- Popover;
- Datepicker, and others.
4. Teradata Covalent UI Platform
Covalent is an open-source UI platform that runs on AngularJS. It offers a set of style guides and design patterns that make front-end code much cleaner and simpler to read. The Covalent platform has present configurations. This allows software developers to jumpstart the application development process, making them focus on application functionality rather than platform customization.
The platform follows Atomic Design Principles which involve modular design and uniting smaller components, like buttons into bigger ones such as forms.
Teradata Covalent UI Platform includes the following components:
- Base layout;
- Expansion panels;
- Manage list;
- Stepper;
- Breadcrumbs;
- Loading;
- Virtual scrolling, and others.
5. Nebular
Nebular is a customizable Angular UI component library that significantly simplifies application development. It offers four visual themes, a robust theming engine, 40+ UI components, and supports custom CSS properties. Besides that, it has strong security modules that include authentication and security layers adaptable for APIs.
Nebular components include:
- Sidebar;
- Infinite list;
- Tooltip;
- Layout;
- Window;
- Checkbox;
- Context menu;
- Global search, and many others.
6. Onsen UI
Onsen UI is a popular open-source Angular UI framework for cross-platform, hybrid mobile development and building Progressive web applications (PWAs). It runs on iOS and Android platforms having the same source code for both.
Onsen UI framework adjusts to various platforms and offers automatic styling, depending on the development project. It has a large variety of UI components that provide a native look for Android and iOS, including:
- Tabs;
- Side menu;
- Lists;
- Forms;
- Stack navigation.
7. Angular Material
Angular Material is an AngularJS component library for mobile, desktop, and web application development. It’s a super-popular set of UI libraries for Angular supported by Google with 20.9k stars on GitHub.
It offers a wide range of ready-made UI components and templates that can be quickly generated from a command line. Above all, it has clear documentation with detailed guides and tutorials.
The Angular Material components include:
- Side navigation;
- ToolBar menu;
- Tooltip, Snackbar, Dialog;
- Data table format;
- Checkbox, Formfield, and Datapicker;
- Progress Spinner, Progress Bar;
- Grid List, Cars, Tabs, Expansion Panel, and many others.
8. NG Lightning
NG Lightning is an Angular component library designed especially for the Lightning Design System of Salesforce, a CSS framework. It provides Angular developers with native directives and components that make application design consistent and smooth.
The NG Lightning components are stateless and depend only on the input properties. This ensures better performance and higher development flexibility.
Some NG Lightning components are:
- Lookups;
- Datatables;
- Ratings;
- Breadcrumbs;
- Badges;
- Spinners;
- Icons, and many others.
9. NG-Zorro
NG-Zorro is an open-source Angular UI component library based on the Ant Design UI library used for React development. It offers a set of 60+ top-notch out-of-box components for building eye-catching and interactive user interfaces.
Developed by the Chinese, this component library has already gained its recognition among major market leaders such as Alibaba, Apache Flink, Aliyun, and others.
NG-Zorro components include:
- Buttons;
- Typography;
- Grid;
- Space;
- Affix;
- Breadcrumb;
- Form;
- DatePicker;
- Rates;
- Transfers, and many more.
10. Kendo UI for Angular
Kendo UI is a remarkable AngularJS component library that perfectly suits for building enterprise applications. Many software developers consider Kendo the most professional suit to work with. It has commercial support, an extensive library of components, 70+ jQuery widgets, great customization features, and eloquent documentation.
It has 2.3k stars on GitHub and the most famous companies like Deloitte, TeamViewer, ABB, Telerik, Afw.com, and others use Kendo UI in their web applications.
Bottom Line
AngualrJS stays one of the most popular front-end development frameworks around the world. It facilitates software development and allows building stable, attractive, and secure web and mobile applications.
For building eye-catching and diverse user interfaces with Angular, software developers implement a wide variety of component libraries. They help to speed up the AngularJS development and diversify user interface designs with various features, making them highly responsive and rich.
Also Read: 5 Simple Steps to Learn Angular
