Angular the best components in 2021
I must admit that most of the companies I worked with developed their own angular components.
But usually, I'm active as consultant for BIG companies with many developers.
Pre-built components are great for small internal projects inside your company, for your personal projects or to quickly build your solution as startup company.
At one point your requirements will be so specific and you will discover so many bugs in the external components that you will start to develop your own components / libraries.
Here is a list of what I found around the web.
Angular Material
Link: Angular Material
GitHub: https://github.com/angular/components - 21.7k Stars
Angular Material is the 'official' UI components suite released by the Angular / Google Team.
It's often the only external components library accepted in big companies because is an extension of the framework.
To really profit from this library you need to understand the Material Design concepts https://material.io/design and play with the CDK https://material.angular.io/cdk/categories.
If you don't spend time to understand it your result risks being pretty ugly visually and at code level.
Many developers think that Angular Material is over-engineered ... well if you are a React.js/Vue.js dev you think the same about Angular.
I professionally use this library for internal projects and it gets the job done.
PrimeNG
Link: PrimeNg
GitHub: https://github.com/primefaces/primeng - 6.9k stars
You can find often PrimeNG in environments with a strong Java culture. This is because PrimeFaces was 'de facto' the standard library to develop JavaServer Faces (JSF).
PrimeNG offers a great variety of components with a lot of features 'out of the box'. It could be worth a try if you are prototyping a solution.
What I notice in the companies that used PrimeFaces is that they adopt the library when they migrate the stack towards Angular and they abandon it when they start to build their own libraries.
I think that one issue of PrimeNg, for these companies, is that you have to build a license if you want support and / or you want a nice and cool design (style) to apply to your components.
If you are in a small team and you have to develop quickly without 'administrative' issues in spending few bucks is licenses, probably PrimeNg has a lot to offer.
Clarity Design
Link: Clarity Design
GitHub: https://github.com/vmware/clarity - 6.3k stars
With well designed components Clarity try to implement a full design system that allows you to create visually appealing web applications.
The library is built by the VMWare Team and I think is used internally for their products. I personally like their style unfortunately I never found the opportunity to use them in deep.
The features of the components are more limited compared to other libraries and the design didn't fit for PWA (the requirement at the time).
I'd suggest you to give it a try if your requirements are well defined and Clarity can satisfy them.
Teradata Covalent
Link: Covalent
GitHub: https://github.com/Teradata/covalent
Teradata is based on material design, they have some very 'technical' components (e.g. Code Editor, Charts).
I never used this library, but I suggest you to give a look and see what they can offer that maybe you cannot find in other libraries.
Taiga UI
Link: Taiga UI
GitHub: https://github.com/TinkoffCreditSystems/taiga-ui - 1.7k start
This is a discovery in 2021, at least for me. I didn't test the components yet but they seem polished with some components that you cannot find in other libraries.
I'll try to use this library for my next project.
ng-alain
Link: ng-alain
GitHub: https://github.com/ng-alain/ng-alain/ - 4.2k start
This library is based on ng-zorro ant design. I cannot write a lot about this library because I never used it.
Ant Design seems to be pretty widespread in Asia and you can find the implementations of this design for other frameworks.
It could be worth more investigation if you are looking for alternative designs.
other
For sure you can find other projects on the web (bootstrap for angular etc.). I tried to limit the list to some pretty solid projects that should avoid surprises during the development.
If you know other libraries of components that could be interesting to mention here, drop me a line.