Component Libraries: Should You Build Your Own or Use a Prebuilt One?

Component libraries are a vital tool in web application development in maintaining uniform design, shortening the time taken to develop web applications and improving reusability of the code. Some developers find this dilemma; should they create a component library or use an existing one? In addition, they help reduce the struggle while building well-designed and interactive websites because of the availability of animation-oriented UIs such as Accentricity UI among others. Now, let’s get more to the point in order to help you find the right way.

What is a Component Library?

Component libraries are collections of reusable UI elements such as buttons, forms, modals, and more— and are intended to reuse the components across several projects. Such libraries not only guarantee a consistent look of an application but also save time and costs during its implementation because the elements have been already coded. So, there's no need to build components from scratch.

Prebuilt Component Libraries

Prebuilt Component Libraries

Prebuilt component libraries are the ready-made collections of different UI components that are specifically designed and optimized for common use cases that developers can face during development. Some well-known examples include:

Material-UI (MUI):

A library based on React and it follows Google's Material-UI design, MUI allows a comprehensive set of components customization.

Ant Design:

It's an UI design system framework for enterprise-level products, ant design offers built-in themes and a rich set of UI components.

Bootstrap:

It's an widely-used CSS framework that provides basic components and a responsive grid system.

Pros of Prebuilt Libraries :

• Rapid Development: Prebuilt libraries save a lot of time of the developers by providing pre-designed reusable components that you can quickly integrate into your project.

• Standardized Design: They help ensure a consistent user experience across different screens and features.

• Community Support: Many prebuilt libraries come with robust community support, providing a wealth of tutorials, plugins, and enhancements.

Cons of Prebuilt Libraries

• Limited Customization: Customizing components to fit your unique design can sometimes be difficult, leading to constraints on flexibility.

• Performance Overhead: Many prebuilt libraries come with extra features you may not need, which can bloat your codebase.

Pros And Cons of Prebuilt Libraries

Animation-Centric Libraries: Bringing UIs to Life

In recent years, a new category of libraries has emerged, specifically focused on providing built-in animations and smooth UI transitions. These libraries not only offer pre-designed components but also emphasize adding dynamic, interactive features to web applications.

Here are some popular examples of animation-focused libraries:

Lottie

Category: Animation Integration Library

Lottie:The industry standard for motion design

What it Offers: Lottie allows you to render animations created in Figma or Adobe After Effects as JSON files using the built-in plugins. These animations are then rendered natively on the web, offering high-quality motion without a heavy performance impact.

Why It’s Useful: Lottie is perfect for apps or websites requiring rich, scalable animations that are lightweight. It’s commonly used for logos, loading animations, and subtle UI effects. Unlike other component libraries, it focuses purely on bringing visual design elements from tools like Figma & After Effects into the web environment.

Accentricity UI

Category: Hybrid Component and Animation Library

What it Offers:

 Accentricity UI combines traditional UI components with built-in support for smooth animations and transitions. It offers a wide range of components like buttons, forms, modals, and navigation menus, but with an added layer of predefined animations, making it easier to create interactive, dynamic interfaces.

In addition to these standard components, Accentricity UI provides responsive behaviors and subtle animation effects like hover states, fade-ins, and sliding transitions that enhance user engagement. The library's components are fully customizable, allowing developers to easily adjust animation timings, easing functions, and durations to match the look and feel of their brand, ensuring both visual appeal and performance across devices.

Why It’s Useful:

Think about it, what would be easy for a dev? Making a custom component with tons of animation which the dev has to write from scratch and polish it before the deadline or use a library, where the dev can make use of the library with the built-in support to combine the custom designed elements with smooth animations and transitions offered by the library.  

It’s particularly helpful for developers who want the convenience of a prebuilt library but need polished, built-in animations to enhance user experience without writing complex animation code from scratch.

Framer Motion

Category: Animation-focused Component Library (React)

Framer Motion

What it Offers:

Framer Motion is a powerful library for React that allows you to create fluid animations and micro interactions with minimal effort. It supports interactive features like drag, scroll, and spring-based animations, which makes it ideal for interactive & highly animated UIs. It also provides easy-to-use APIs for gesture-based animations and layout transitions, offering developers extensive control over complex animations while maintaining simplicity in implementation.

Why It’s Useful:

Framer Motion combines the simplicity of component libraries with the flexibility of advanced animation frameworks, making it easy to enhance user interfaces with dynamic visual effects. It’s a great choice for React developers who want to integrate animation without compromising performance or adding significant overhead. With its built-in optimizations for smooth rendering, Framer Motion ensures high-quality animations that enhance both usability and visual appeal.

Should You Use Prebuilt Animation Libraries?

The role of animations is really important in web applications to enhance the UX(user experience), by making interfaces feel more fluid and interactive makes user's remember the website due to its great experience. Since users are constantly getting used to smooth effects, micro-interaction and dynamic feedback, animations are no longer viewed as a good to have feature but are rather considered as a must have feature. Prebuilt animation libraries like Framer Motion and GSAP (GreenSock Animation Platform) simplify this process by providing powerful, flexible tools that allow developers to integrate complex animations without having to manually manage every aspect of motion or dive deep into animation theory.

Advantages of Animation-Centric Libraries

Advantages of Animation-Centric Libraries

Ease of Use

Prebuilt animation libraries abstract away the complexities of coding animations from scratch. Without manually writing keyframes, easing functions, or browser-optimized transitions, developers can simply use predefined APIs to implement fluid animations. This drastically reduces development time, as many animation details are handled by the library, letting developers focus on building features and interactions rather than tweaking animations for performance or cross-browser compatibility. For example, with a few lines of code, animations can be applied to any UI element, making the development process much more efficient.

Advanced Features

Many animation libraries offer advanced features that go far beyond basic transitions like fade-ins and slide animations. These include timeline control, scroll-triggered animations, physics-based interactions, and even 3D transformations. For instance, timeline control allows developers to create synchronized sequences of animations, which can be used to create smooth, coordinated interactions across multiple elements. Scroll-based animations enhance user engagement by triggering effects as the user scrolls, perfect for parallax websites or content reveal effects. Physics-based animations, such as spring-based drag-and-drop or object bouncing, add natural, realistic movement to interactive elements, elevating the overall experience. Additionally, 3D transformations provide extensive control over how objects rotate, scale, or move in three-dimensional space, something that is cumbersome to achieve with native CSS alone.

Seamless Integration

One of the major benefits of prebuilt animation libraries is their seamless integration with popular frameworks and component libraries. For example, libraries like Framer Motion are specifically built for React, enabling developers to easily animate components without altering their core structure. This native integration allows developers to animate UI elements using simple hooks or props, maintaining the component-based architecture of the app. Moreover, these libraries are framework-agnostic in many cases, which means they can be applied across different environments like Vue, Angular, or even plain JavaScript. This flexibility allows teams to incrementally add animations to existing UIs without needing a complete redesign, making it easier to enhance user experience while maintaining a clean and manageable codebase.

Disadvantages of Animation-Centric Libraries

Learning Curve

Although these libraries simplify the process of implementing animations, there’s still a learning curve involved, particularly for advanced features. Some libraries, for example, offer sophisticated tools like timeline-based animation control or physics-based interactions, which require developers to understand animation concepts like synchronization, damping, stiffness, and velocity. For those who are new to animation, mastering these concepts can take time. While simple animations like fades and transitions are easy to implement, more intricate effects require an understanding of timelines, states, and asynchronous event handling, which can be challenging for beginners. For example, even simple physics-based gestures can involve a detailed understanding of forces and motion, which developers must grasp to make full use of these tools.

Performance Overhead

Animations can have a significant impact on performance if not implemented carefully. Prebuilt libraries are optimized for performance, but if animations are overused or poorly managed, they can negatively affect page load times and runtime performance. This is particularly a concern on resource-constrained devices such as older smartphones or tablets. Overloading a webpage with multiple animated elements can cause slow initial page loads, jittery (uneven) frame rates, and even battery drain on mobile devices. Continuous or complex animations, such as those involving 3D transformations or large datasets, may require careful optimization. Developers need to be aware of the potential performance costs and use animations judiciously, especially in performance-critical applications where speed and responsiveness are paramount.

In a Nutshell, Prebuilt animation libraries like Framer Motion and Accentricity UI offer a wealth of tools for creating engaging, visually appealing interfaces with minimal effort compared to writing custom animations from scratch. They provide significant advantages in terms of ease of use, advanced features, and seamless integration into existing projects. However, developers must be prepared to navigate the learning curve for more complex animations and remain conscious of the potential performance impact on lower-end devices.

Ultimately, whether you choose to use an animation-centric library depends on your project's needs. For applications where user experience and interface fluidity are paramount, these libraries can make a huge difference in both speed and quality of implementation. However, if your application requires minimal animations or operates in a performance-sensitive environment, a more careful or custom approach may be necessary.

Building Your Own Component Library

Customizing your own component library means that you have the liberty to craft each element, design and animate all the way to building the functionalities of the application in the way you want. Nevertheless, this is the most flexible approach however, it is also the most time consuming.

 Building Your Own  Component Library

Pros of Building Your Own Component Library

1. Full Customization: You can tailor each component to match your brand’s specific visual style and performance needs.

2. Optimized Performance: By building only what you need, you avoid the bloat that often comes with prebuilt libraries.

3. Advanced Animation Control: Custom libraries give you full control over how animations are applied, allowing you to use tools like GSAP or even write animations from scratch for complete flexibility.

Cons of Building Your Own Library

1. Time-Consuming: It requires a significant time investment to design, develop, test, and maintain custom components and animations.

2. Maintenance Burden: Keeping your library up to date with evolving frameworks and browser standards can be a long-term challenge.

Which Option Should You Choose?

It is up to you whether to build animations from scratch or to use a prebuilt one, based on the intricacy and duration of the project and the specific design needs.

Use a Prebuilt Library If:

• You need to ship a product quickly and focus more on functionality and designing interface than building beautiful animations.

• Your UI needs are relatively standard, and the animation requirements can be met with libraries like Framer Motion or Accentricity UI.

• You want proper community support, regular updates, and quick bug fixes.

Build Your Own Library If:

• You need custom UI components and highly specific animations that prebuilt libraries can’t accommodate.

• You have the time and resources to maintain your own library in the long run.

• You have a huge budget and are working on a project where brand identity and performance optimization are top priorities.

Conclusion

Key conclusions on using component libraries.

For most projects, using prebuilt libraries—especially those with animation support like Framer Motion, GSAP, or Accentricity UI—provides a solid balance of speed, flexibility, and user experience. However, if your project requires specialized UI components or highly customized animations, building your own component library might be worth the investment. Consider your team’s goals, resources, and the user experience you’re aiming to create before making your decision.