Ant Design vs styled-components: What are the differences?

Introduction

Ant Design and styled-components are both popular front-end UI libraries used in web development. While they serve a similar purpose of creating user interfaces, they have some key differences that set them apart.

1. Styling Approach: Ant Design is primarily based on CSS-in-JS approach, where the styles are defined within JavaScript files. It provides a set of pre-designed components with predefined styles, making it easy to create consistent and visually appealing interfaces. On the other hand, styled-components allows developers to write actual CSS code within JavaScript by using tagged template literals. This gives them more flexibility and control over the styling process.

2. Customization: Ant Design provides a wide range of customizable components, allowing developers to easily modify the appearance and behavior according to their needs. It offers a set of predefined themes that can be easily applied to the components. In contrast, styled-components focuses more on individual component styling. Developers can create reusable styled components with custom styles and use them throughout the application.

3. Dependencies: Ant Design relies on a number of dependencies such as React, React-DOM, and prop-types for its functionality. It is designed to work well with the React ecosystem. On the other hand, styled-components has fewer dependencies and can be used with any JavaScript framework or library. It provides a standalone solution for component styling.

4. Performance: Due to its extensive use of inline styles and pre-defined components, Ant Design may have a larger file size compared to styled-components. This can affect the overall performance of the application, especially in scenarios with slow network connections. In contrast, styled-components generates fully optimized CSS during the build process, resulting in smaller file sizes and potentially better performance.

5. Community and Ecosystem: Ant Design has a large and active community with a wide range of resources, tutorials, and support available. It also has a comprehensive set of official documentation and guidelines. styled-components also has a dedicated community, but it might have a smaller ecosystem compared to Ant Design. However, styled-components is highly extensible and can be combined with other tools and libraries to create a powerful styling solution.

6. Development Experience: When using Ant Design, developers can quickly prototype and build UI components by leveraging the pre-designed styles and components provided by the library. This can speed up the development process and reduce the amount of CSS code required. On the other hand, styled-components provides a more flexible and intuitive way of styling components. Developers can write CSS code directly within the component definition, making it easier to manage and maintain the styles.

In Summary, Ant Design and styled-components differ in their styling approach, customization options, dependencies, performance, community support, and development experience.