Mantine vs Shadcn/ui: A Comprehensive Comparison

As a React developer constantly hunting for that perfect UI library, I recently found myself torn between two powerful contenders: Shadcn/ui and Mantine. Both offer sleek components and modern design—but which one actually feels better to work with in a day-to-day development?

When choosing a UI library, it’s not just about how pretty the components look—it’s also about how well the library fits into your workflow. To keep things fair and practical, I’ll be comparing Shadcn/ui and Mantine based on the following criteria:

1. Installation & Setup – How easy is it to get started?

2. Selection of Components – Are the components polished, well-designed, and do they cover common use cases?

3. Customization – How much control do you have over the look and behavior?

4. Developer Experience – How does it feel to work with day-to-day? How’s the documentation? Any quirks?

5. Community & Ecosystem – How active is the project? Is it well-maintained and growing?

6. AI-Assisted Coding – How well do AI tools (like Copilot or ChatGPT) understand and generate code using the library?

I’ll assign a score from 0 to 5 for each category. Keep in mind—this is a highly subjective comparison based on my own experience and preferences as a developer.

Comparison

Mantine

Mantine is a modern React UI library built to help developers ship fast with clean, accessible components and a strong focus on developer experience. It offers a broad range of building blocks—from inputs and buttons to modals, date pickers, and form utilities—designed to cover most everyday use cases in web apps.

Beyond components, Mantine also includes a useful set of hooks and utilities—like form handling, notifications, and responsive design helpers—making it more than just a visual library.

Note that while Mantine integrates seamlessly with server-side frameworks like Next.js, it consists solely of client components and does not support server-side components.

Installation and setup: Getting started with Mantine is straightforward. You can install it via npm or yarn, and the documentation walks you through the setup step by step. It includes official templates for Vite and Next.js, so you can get productive within minutes.

In addition to the official resources, there are also several community templates that combine Mantine with popular tools like Supabase or the T3 Stack, making it even easier to scaffold a modern web app with your favorite tech stack. Point: 5/5

Selection of components: Mantine offers 100+ well-designed components that cover most common UI needs—buttons, modals, inputs, tabs, notifications, drawers, tooltips, date pickers, and more. The components are consistently styled, responsive, and accessible by default. Everything feels polished and production-ready.

What really stands out are the thoughtful touches baked into many components—like built-in support for loading and error states, transitions, and highly customizable props. For example, the TextInput component includes an error prop where you can pass in an error message directly and the Button component supports a loading prop for showing a spinner with minimal effort. While libraries like shadcn/ui also offer useful props, Mantine tends to be more thorough and developer-friendly out of the box.

Compared to shadcn/ui, Mantine ships with a broader selection of components. Here are some notable ones that are either missing or more limited in Shadcn:

• MultiSelect
• Slider with labeled marks
• Dropzone (file uploader)
• DateTimePicker and rich date utilities via @mantine/dates
• PasswordInput with toggleable visibility
• Autocomplete with async support
• Tab Component

Mantine also includes some advanced components like carousels, charts, and rich text editors. These are built on top of popular third-party libraries but are styled and integrated to match the Mantine ecosystem. Even though they’re wrappers, they’re well-maintained and clearly documented.

Beyond components, Mantine ships with useful extras like @mantine/hooks and @mantine/form, which help you handle things like client-side state and validation without needing additional libraries like Zod (though you can still use them if you prefer). Utility hooks like useDebouncedCallback are also included in the package.

For design inspiration, ui.mantine.dev is a fantastic resource—it showcases component examples like hero headers, stat blocks, and application cards that you can copy and adapt directly into your projects.

The only noticeable gap in Mantine’s component offering is the lack of a built-in Data Table Component. While there are community-driven options like Mantine React Table and Mantine DataTable, neither offers the same level of seamless integration or polish as Mantine’s core components. Point: 4.5/5

Customization: Mantine offers a robust customization system through its global theming, allowing you to define tokens for colors, fonts, spacing, and more, ensuring consistency across components. While it's possible to integrate TailwindCSS with Mantine, I found the combination to be a bit inconsistent and prone to edge cases, so I’d recommend sticking to Mantine’s built-in system.

For fans of shadcn/ui's aesthetic, the community project MantineHub can help replicate that style. However, it requires some setup and can break when you apply deep customizations like padding or margins.

While Mantine allows for extensive customization, it’s still a component library, so for highly custom layouts, you might need to resort to custom components or styling. Overall, Mantine offers great flexibility for most use cases. Point: 4/5

Developer Experience: The documentation is clear, well-structured, and full of real-world usage examples, including interactive code playgrounds for most components. The library is thoughtfully designed—common use cases are easy, and edge cases are still possible without hacks. On top of that, Mantine’s error messages are usually helpful and guide you in the right direction. Everything just feels fast, smooth, and predictable when building with it. Point: 5/5

Community & Ecosystem: Mantine has an active and welcoming community, especially on Discord—where you can usually get help within minutes. As of April 2025, the library sees around 360,000 weekly downloads, which reflects its growing adoption and trust in the ecosystem. Mantine is already at version 7, showing consistent development and refinement over time.

That said, it’s worth mentioning that most of the work is driven by a single developer, Vitaly Rtishchev. While community contributions are welcomed via pull requests, the review process can sometimes be slow—I personally had a small bug fix PR that sat untouched for several months. Still, Vitaly is committed to working full-time on Mantine and has shared plans to continue maintaining and evolving the project, which inspires confidence in its long-term future. Point: 3.5/5

AI-Assisted Coding: Mantine works decently with AI tools like GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT, but I’ve noticed that the hallucinations are stronger, especially with models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet. It often imports components that aren’t part of Mantine, such as UnstyledButton, or generates excessive custom CSS that isn’t necessary. While the basic scaffolding for common components works fine, AI frequently drifts back to Tailwind CSS or introduces extraneous styling and components, making it a bit frustrating. For consistent Mantine-specific code generation, manual adjustments are usually required. Point: 3/5

Shadcn/ui

Shadcn/ui isn’t a traditional UI library but a collection of customizable, pre-built components based on RadixUI and styled with TailwindCSS. It follows a "copy-paste" approach, allowing you to import only the components you need, keeping your project lean and focused.

With full access to the code, you have complete flexibility to modify components to fit your needs. This results in a smaller bundle size and more control over customization. However, it also means you’re responsible for maintaining the code and addressing any bugs that come up.

Installation and setup: The documentation provides templates for popular frameworks like Next.js, TanStack, and Vite. All you need to do is install the required dependencies and copy the relevant code from the Shadcn/ui docs and you're good to go. The setup is lightweight and doesn’t require complex configuration, making it quick and easy to integrate into your project. Point: 5/5

Selection of components: Shadcn/ui provides a curated set of components built on top of Radix UI primitives—such as buttons, dialogs, dropdowns, inputs, and tabs. These components cover the most common UI patterns but remain intentionally minimal compared to Mantine. For example, the Button component lacks built-in features like a loading prop.

Advanced or niche components—like multi-selects, date range pickers, or dropzones—aren’t included out of the box. You're expected to either build them yourself or integrate third-party solutions. This “only-what-you-need” philosophy keeps your codebase clean and maintainable but requires extra effort if your project needs a wider UI toolkit.

One bonus is the example for a data table—while basic, it shows how to integrate a third-party library and structure the component yourself.

If you're looking for more components, the repo awesome-shadcn-ui is a helpful resource that showcases community-contributed components and useful extensions. Point: 3/5

Customization: Shadcn/ui offers significant flexibility when it comes to customization. Since you own the code, you have full control over the styling. You can modify existing styles or extend them to meet your design needs, all while keeping your project lightweight.

However, this approach means you're responsible for maintaining customizations and ensuring everything stays consistent. It offers total freedom but can become time-consuming if you need extensive tweak. Point: 5/5

Developer Experience: Shadcn/ui provides a solid developer experience—especially if you're comfortable with TailwindCSS. The documentation is clean and includes copy-paste examples that are easy to adapt, and since you're working directly with the component code, there's no abstraction layer to get in your way. However, you’ll often write more boilerplate compared to something like Mantine, and the Tailwind-centric workflow might not suit everyone. For beginners or those who prefer abstraction, Mantine generally feels easier and more approachable. Point: 4/5

Community & Ecosystem: Shadcn/ui has quickly built a strong following in the React and TailwindCSS communities. Despite being a relatively new project, it has already gained 85.3k stars on GitHub—far surpassing more established libraries like Mantine, which has around 28.3k. This highlights the momentum and interest around its approach to component styling and customization.

The project is actively maintained, though it's primarily handled by a single developer. However, this isn’t a major concern since Shadcn is built on top of Radix UI, a robust and well-maintained low-level component library. Radix handles accessibility and core interaction logic, while Shadcn focuses on styling.

While there's no official Discord or large-scale support community, GitHub issues and discussions are active and helpful. Point: 4.5/5

AI-Assisted Coding: Shadcn/ui works exceptionally well with modern AI coding tools like ChatGPT and Claude. Since it uses TailwindCSS and all component code is accessible, AI models can generate accurate, copy-paste-ready snippets with minimal hallucination. Compared to Mantine, there are fewer issues like incorrect imports or unnecessary custom CSS—making it a more reliable choice for AI-assisted workflows.

Additionally, tools like Vercel's v0 allow you to generate full UIs from prompts using Shadcn components. It's a powerful shortcut for prototyping or scaffolding apps quickly with production-ready code. Point: 5/5

Conclusion

Mantine and Shadcn/ui both offer strong solutions for building React UIs, but with different approaches. Mantine stands out with its rich set of ready-to-use components, solid documentation, and ease of use, making it a great choice for developers who want a comprehensive, production-ready UI with minimal setup. With a score of 25, it offers a developer-friendly experience but can be more limiting when it comes to customization.

Shadcn/ui, on the other hand, is more minimalistic, providing only the essential components and allowing for full customization. Its reliance on RadixUI primitives gives developers more control, though it requires more effort to build advanced components or integrate third-party solutions. Shadcn/ui scores 26.5, reflecting its flexibility and the active community supporting it.

Ultimately, the decision between Mantine and Shadcn/ui depends on your project's needs. Choose Mantine if you want an all-in-one, polished solution, or go with Shadcn/ui if you prefer flexibility and a leaner setup.