From Element UI to Radix UI: Evaluating Past Strengths and New Advantages

In the early days of frontend development, Element UI was a powerful assistant, offering a rich set of components that allowed rapid construction of attractive and functional interfaces, and it quickly became a popular UI component library for many projects.

However, as projects grew and business requirements became more complex, Element UI began to reveal several drawbacks:

Fixed component style : The uniform design reduces learning cost but limits brand‑specific customization, making it hard to achieve differentiated visual identities.

Limited applicable scenarios : It excels at building backend management systems but struggles with complex interactions and fine‑grained visual effects, often requiring extensive CSS overrides.

Relatively closed ecosystem : Built on Vue 2 while the Vue ecosystem has shifted to Vue 3 . Although Element Plus exists, migration and compatibility issues still cause inconvenience.

High customization cost : Modifying internal component structures or styles demands deep source‑code investigation, increasing development and maintenance effort.

Our team experienced these problems in historical projects: the fixed component style hindered personalized branding, extensive style overrides reduced maintainability, and complex interaction scenarios often exceeded Element UI 's capabilities.

To address these challenges, we decided to replace our UI components with Radix UI , a modern library that emphasizes flexibility, extensibility, and accessibility.

Radix UI offers several key advantages:

Highly customizable : It provides unstyled components that deliver only interaction logic, leaving all visual design to the developer. This enables the use of Design Tokens to manage styling consistently with a brand system.

Broad applicability : Its composable, plug‑in design works well for complex interactions and fine‑grained visuals. Radix UI supports both Vue and React , allowing seamless integration regardless of the chosen framework.

Good ecosystem compatibility : Components are built on standard Web APIs, leveraging native CSS pseudo‑classes and custom events without extra libraries. The modular architecture lets developers import only needed parts, reducing bundle size and improving performance.

Accessibility focus : Every component follows WAI‑ARIA best practices, ensuring that applications are usable by people relying on assistive technologies.

Ease of customization and development : Rich APIs and hooks enable deep customization while keeping state management and event handling simple. An active community provides continuous updates and extensive resources.

After integrating Radix UI into our legacy projects, we were able to replace the previous styles with custom designs that match our brand, handle complex interactions more smoothly, and improve overall application quality and user experience.

In summary, while Element UI once served us well, its limitations became apparent as our needs evolved. Radix UI 's flexibility, extensibility, and accessibility made it the preferred choice for our team, revitalizing our projects and delivering higher‑quality products.

Documentation links:

Radix vue : https://www.radix-vue.com/

Radix react : https://radix-ui.com.cn/