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I have been exploring Blazor for a few years now. There are many Blazor beginner videos on my YouTube channel and this blog. I have built internal tools, but I never made them look great.

It finally made me look for a user interface library for Blazor that gives me access to great-looking, pre-implemented controls and components.

And let me tell you, there are more projects than I could believe. There are so many options to choose from that I have yet to decide.

However, it was the perfect time to record an overview of all the available free and open-source user interface libraries for Blazor development.

Radzen

Let’s start this list with a blast. Radzen is a company, but their component library with the same name is open source and free for commercial use. The component library offers more than 70 native Blazor UI controls.

With more than 3 million downloads and more than 2 thousand stars on GitHub, it’s fair to say the Razden Blazor Component library is well-known and widely used.

The component library ranges from simple input fields to more advanced components, such as a feature-rich data grid and a scheduler.

Radzen also offers a professional license as a paid subscription, including premium themes, additional tooling, and, most importantly, 24-hour dedicated customer support.

It makes Radzen a great choice for individual developers and companies.

URL: https://blazor.radzen.com/
License: MIT
GitHub Stars: 2.4k
Downloads: 3.4M

Blazorise

Blazorise is developed by Megabit and offers more than 80 modern native UI controls for Blazor.

Blazorise stands out with its support for multiple CSS frameworks. We can use Bootstrap, Tailwind, Material, AntDesign, or Bulma.

Blazorise offers everything you’d expect from a user interface controls library.

Like Radzen, Blazorise is free and open source but offers paid subscriptions, including professional support. Blazorise is a few hundred dollars cheaper than Radzen.

However, be aware of the dual licensing of Blazorise. You can use Blazorise for private projects, non-profit organizations, and small businesses. But you must purchase a commercial license for $1M per year or more in gross revenue or with more than five employees. Read more about its license on their GitHub page.

URL: https://blazorise.com/
License: Apache/Commercial
Stars: 2.8k
Downloads: 2M

Blazored

Blazored sounds almost the same as Blazorised but is completely different.

Blazored is mainly developed by Chris Sainty, Microsoft MVP, speaker, author of Blazor in Action, and well-known for other massive contributions to the Blazor community. There are also a few packages within the Blazored organization on GitHub that other developers maintain.

Blazored has a package for every component, making it very simple to include only pieces to the application you need.

Blazored is developed by the community and doesn’t have an associated business entity. The number of components is limited to 15. It includes a package to access the local storage and to show toast notifications, or modal dialogs, to name a few.

The controls are genuinely open-source and free to use. There is no commercial license or commercial support.

URL: https://github.com/orgs/Blazored/
License: MIT
Stars: 50-900
Downloads: 4M

MatBlazor

MatBlazor was one of the first Blazor UI Controls libraries for Blazor. It currently has around 30 controls and lives under the GitHub account of Vladimir Samoilenko, better known for his social handle @SamProf.

MatBlazor has been actively developed from 2018 to 2021. There was a break in new versions from 2021 until April 2023.

MatBlazor was very early and is now a widely adopted community project primarily led by SamProf. Today, it accumulated over 1.4M downloads.

Similar to Blazored, MatBlazor is community-driven, free, and open-source and doesn’t offer commercial licenses or professional support.

URL: https://www.matblazor.com/
License: MIT
Stars: 2.8k
Downloads: 1.4M

Mud Blazor

MudBlazor is a Material Design component library for Blazor. Its focus is ease of use and clear structure.

The goal is to free the developer from writing JavaScript or CSS. Using the MudBlazor components, you do not need to know or use CSS, even though you can if you need it.

MudBlazor contains more than 50 controls and comes with theming support.

With more than 5000 stars on GitHub, MudBlazor is one of the most popular control libraries for Blazor.

There are more than 200 contributors listed on GitHub, even though Jonny Larsson and Meinrad Recheis authored most of the commits.

URL: https://mudblazor.com/
License: MIT
Stars: 5.2k
Downloads: 3.8M

Microsoft Fluent UI Blazor Components

The Microsoft Fluent UI Blazor Components library allows us to build applications with the look and feel of modern Microsoft applications.

Some components are wrappers around Microsoft’s official FluentUI Web Components. Others leverage fluent UI design systems but are natively implemented.

There are many components available, and they really look like Microsoft applications. If that’s something that is important to you, Microsoft Fluent UI is probably the way to go.

I have to admit that with around 1.3k stars on GitHub and about 450k downloads, this library is more popular than I assumed. It’s an active project with more than 20 contributors, with a Microsoft employee leading the charge.

URL: https://github.com/microsoft/fluentui-blazor
License: MIT
Stars: 1.3k
Downloads: 450k

Ant Design Blazor

Ant Design Blazor is a set of UI components based on Ant Design and Blazor.

The Ant Group is a Chinese subsidiary of the Alibaba Group that created its own design system.

I’m neither an expert in user interface design nor design systems, so it’s hard to judge the difference between those design systems for me.

However, Ant Design Blazor has its own look and has almost 5k stars on GitHub, as well as 700k downloads on NuGet, and comes with an MIT license.

URL: https://antblazor.com/
License: MIT
Stars: 4.9k
Downloads: 700k

BlazorStrap

BlazorStrap makes Bootstrap components available as Blazor components. Instead of using the Bootstrap CSS classes that come with the default Blazor templates, BlazorStrap makes them available as components.

It’s a much more convenient and maintainable approach for me.

The library is in active development and supports the latest Bootstrap 5 version, and as far as I can tell, all Bootstrap components are available as Blazor components.

With over 700k downloads and 800 stars on GitHub, this library is also a very popular choice for developers using Bootstrap as their CSS framework.

URL: https://blazorstrap.io/
License: The Unlicense
Stars: 800
Downloads: 700k

What UI Library should you choose?

There are probably more community-led Blazor control libraries than I found during my research. I included all actively developed community projects that I could find. If I didn’t mention your favorite library, please post it in the comments or mention it in the YouTube comments to give it some credit.

I purposely didn’t include any paid products because this article and the video aren’t sponsored, and I wanted to provide more visibility to projects that can’t afford to advertise their libraries.

What user interface library you choose depends on many different factors. Depending on what type of application you build, you might need a different set of components. 

Also, do you need professional support, or is a truly community-driven project the right choice?

Some offer many components but might come with a bigger package size. Others offer fewer components but provide faster loading times.

It’s best to try a few libraries to get a feel for them and compare the libraries that make sense for your use case.

In the end, you’ll have to make a decision and go with that choice. I wouldn’t suggest choosing multiple libraries because they could interfere with each other and bloat your application.

However, no rule without exception. Maybe your use case is a prime example of when to combine two libraries to get the best out of both.

Whatever you choose, there are so many high-quality options for Blazor development. Let me know what library you like the most and why you choose it over other options.

If you want to learn more about Blazor or .NET development, consider subscribing to my YouTube channel, and I’ll see you in the next video.

 

Claudio Bernasconi

I'm an enthusiastic Software Engineer with a passion for teaching .NET development on YouTube, writing articles about my journey on my blog, and making people smile.