HeroUI (formerly NextUI)

HeroUI is a modern React UI component library designed for React 19 and Next.js App Router. It combines accessibility, styling flexibility, and AI-ready tooling.

Core Architecture

• Accessibility-first: Built on React Aria primitives, ensuring robust screen reader support, keyboard navigation, and ARIA compliance out of the box.
• Tailwind CSS v4 Native: Uses a CSS-based theming system with @theme and design tokens, avoiding the runtime overhead associated with CSS-in-JS.
• Compound Component API: Employs a composable pattern (e.g., Card.Header, Table.Column, Modal.Body) to provide full control over markup and layout.
• Server Component Friendly: Designed with React Server Components (RSC) in mind, featuring minimal and clearly documented client boundaries.

AI Tooling Support

HeroUI provides specialized resources to help AI coding assistants work with its APIs accurately:

• MCP Server: For Model Context Protocol integration.
• llms.txt: For providing context to Large Language Models.
• Agent Skills: Specialized instructions for AI agents.

HeroUI Native is an open-source React Native UI component library designed for building beautiful and accessible mobile interfaces. It is built on top of Tailwind v4 and Uniwind, making it compatible with modern mobile technology stacks like Expo.

Key Features

• Beautiful by Default: Professional aesthetics out of the box.
• Accessibility First: Built-in focus management, touch accessibility, and screen reader support following mobile best practices.
• Highly Composable: Components are made of replaceable sub-parts, allowing for deep customization without breaking core logic.
• Developer Friendly: Fully typed APIs with excellent IDE autocomplete support.
• Lightweight: Supports tree-shaking to ensure only the components you actually use are included in your bundle.
• AI-Friendly: APIs are designed to be easily used with AI-assisted development and code generation.

Ecosystem

• HeroUI v3 (Web): React components based on Tailwind CSS v4.
• HeroUI Native (Mobile): Aesthetic components for React Native.
• HeroUI Chat: A platform for creating applications using natural language.
• LLM-oriented UI: Upcoming platforms and MCP (Model Context Protocol) support.

When choosing between HeroUI and Chakra UI in 2026, consider these core architectural differences:

HeroUI and Mantine are both React component libraries with different philosophies:

• HeroUI v3: Focuses on a deep, accessible component set using React Aria, styled with Tailwind CSS v4, and utilizes a compound component API. It is designed for high-compliance environments (WCAG) and features first-party AI tooling (MCP, llms.txt).
• Mantine v8: A 'batteries-included' toolkit with a very broad catalog (120+ components, 70+ hooks). It uses CSS Modules/PostCSS for styling and includes built-in utilities like @mantine/form and @mantine/hooks.

HeroUI is a React component library designed for enterprise-grade applications, focusing on accessibility, performance, and AI-native development. It is built on the following core pillars:

• Accessibility: Powered by React Aria (Adobe), providing industry-leading WCAG compliance, including platform-aware keyboard navigation, screen reader support, touch interactions, and internationalization.
• Styling: Native support for Tailwind CSS v4, utilizing zero-runtime CSS and design tokens defined via standard CSS @theme directives.
• API Pattern: Uses a Compound Component API (e.g., Card.Header, Modal.Body) to provide structural control and prevent prop explosion.
• AI-Native Support: Includes specialized tools like MCP servers, llms.txt, Agent Skills, and AGENTS.md to ensure AI coding assistants (like Cursor or Claude Code) generate accurate, up-to-date code using the correct component structures and imports.