shadcn component libraries

Picking a library is the wrong first move

Every guide to this subject is a list of libraries, which is a useful thing to have read once and an unhelpful thing to have when you need a specific component. The libraries overlap heavily at the common end — everyone ships a button, a dialog and a card — and diverge at exactly the point where you have a real requirement. Six of them publish a file-upload component and they are not equivalent.

Because each item installs by its own URL, nothing forces you to pick. A project can take its data table from one library, its marquee from another and its chart from a third, and the CLI does not care. So the practical question is never which library but who has the component I need, is it free, and is it still maintained. That question is what the item index answers.

What this page counts

• Items is every entry in the library’s own registry.json — not a number from its marketing copy.
• Free means the item endpoint returned the source without credentials when the crawler asked. Paid means it answered 401.
• Last push is the GitHub repository’s own timestamp, where a library has a public repository. Some do not, and say so.
• Libraries with fewer than five components are indexed but left off this page — they are almost all a single component published on its own, and they are all reachable through the registry index.

Questions