Jihye's Blog

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Why I Preferred ShadCN Over MUI in a React App

While building a React application at my previous job, I decided to use ShadCN to construct our UI components. Having previously worked with MUI, I found ShadCN to be a better fit for several reasons—especially in projects where flexibility, simplicity, and Tailwind CSS integration were priorities.

Customisation and Flexibility

One of ShadCN’s biggest strengths is its flexibility. Unlike MUI, which is tightly coupled with Material Design and ships with predefined styles, ShadCN offers a neutral baseline. This made it much easier to create a custom look and feel without fighting against a design system.

I had full control to tailor and extend components as needed. With MUI, even small changes often required overriding styles or wrapping components, leading to bloated, hard-to-read code that made maintenance and debugging more difficult.

Simplicity and Ease of Use

ShadCN is lightweight and focuses on just the essentials. It’s easy to set up and requires minimal boilerplate—great for teams that want to move fast without the overhead of a full design system.

MUI, while powerful, includes a wide range of components and configuration options that can feel overwhelming if you only need a handful of basic elements. For smaller or more focused projects, this added complexity can be a burden rather than a benefit.

Modern and Minimalist Approach

If you're aiming for a clean, modern UI, ShadCN offers a solid foundation. Its components are minimal by default, giving you freedom to define the design direction rather than conforming to a pre-packaged aesthetic.

MUI’s components are more feature-rich and come with many built-in design assumptions. This can be useful in some cases, but for teams seeking simplicity and creative control, it often feels too rigid.

Seamless Integration with Tailwind CSS

Our team was already using Tailwind CSS, so choosing ShadCN made our workflow smoother. The integration is seamless—ShadCN is built with Tailwind in mind, allowing us to use utility classes directly alongside its components for fine-grained control over styles.

MUI doesn’t natively support Tailwind. Getting them to work together often involves custom themes or third-party hacks, adding complexity we didn’t need.

The Trade-Off: Community and Ecosystem

ShadCN’s main drawback right now is its relatively small community and younger ecosystem. In one case, I struggled to customise a dialog component in a non-standard way. Although I eventually found a solution by searching GitHub issues and community threads, it wasn’t always easy to find answers or examples that matched our exact use case.

By contrast, MUI is mature, well-documented, and widely adopted. If you value extensive documentation, established patterns, and a robust support network, MUI is the safer choice.

That said, ShadCN is growing fast—especially among developers who use Tailwind and value modern, flexible approaches to UI development.

Conclusion

While MUI remains a powerful, stable, and well-supported UI library, ShadCN offered the control, simplicity, and Tailwind-first integration that made it a better fit for our team and project. It's ideal for developers who want to build custom UIs without the constraints of a heavy design system—and who don’t mind rolling up their sleeves when documentation runs out.