Today, we can find thousands of React Native component libraries out there. However, selecting the right one isn’t that easy. In fact, you should be careful to choose the most up-to-date and better-performing ones that fit your use case.

Therefore, this article will help you by listing the top component libraries available for React Native in 2021.

0. Bonus: Bit for React Native — Sharing components between decoupled projects

Bit is not another library — it is a new way to share your own components with other projects.

Use Bit to track components in your project and “export” them to Bit’s virtual monorepo — Bit.dev. This will make each component available to be consumed by other projects, and even, to be independently maintained and developed (that means — there’s no need to set up a dev environment just to make a few changes).

1. Lottie for React Native — Animations in Vector Format

Lottie is a mobile library that allows you to add beautiful animations to your react native app. You can choose either any freely available animations or create and add your own ones using Adobe After Effects. It works by exporting animation data in JSON format with Bodymovin and rendering it natively on mobile.

Lottie animations can enhance your application’s user experience, and you don’t need to worry about performance since they’re in vector format.

With 13.5K+ stars on GitHub, Lottie for React Native is a library that you should surely be aware of in 2021.

2. Ignite CLI — Starterkit for Expo and Vanilla React Native

It takes time for developers to set up a React Native project and start developing it. That’s where Ignite comes to make things faster. Ignite is the most popular React Native boilerplate available for both Expo and vanilla React Native.

It’s a starter kit that offers boilerplates and generators that are easy to use and flexible. They’ve just introduced their latest improved version, Ignite 6.0.

Developers who use Ignite CLI reports saving two to four weeks at the beginning of their React Native project!

With 12K stars on GitHub, Ignite is the best open-source starter kit with built-in components, screens, and model generators for React Naive.

3. React Native Maps — Do more with Maps

The React Native Maps library offers highly customizable map components for both Android and iOS. You can change the map view region, customize map style, overlay other elements on the map, and even customize the markers.

The map’s zoom and positioning can be animated using the Animated API to create a better user experience.

With 11.5K+ stars on GitHub, this is the library that you should use if you need to integrate maps into your React Native app.

4. React Navigation and React Native Navigation — Best for Routing and Navigation

Both React Navigation and React Native Navigation are excellent routing and navigation components for your React Native app.

React Navigation

React Navigation is easy to set up and it supports navigation patterns such as stacks, tabs, and drawers.

Besides, React Navigation is completely written in Typescript exporting type definitions for TypeScript projects.

React Native Navigation

On the other hand, React Native Navigation is mostly written in Objective C and Java. It uses the native modules with a JS bridge to have better performance than React Navigation.

Out of the two options, I would suggest using React Navigation. It is also the community solution mostly pushed by Facebook.

React Navigation has 19K+ stars, and React Native Navigation has 12K+ stars on GitHub.

5. Gifted Chat — All in one Chat Component

Gifted Chat Library will help you easily set up a complete chat UI for your React Native app. It includes fully customizable components written with TypeScript, such as loading earlier messages, copying messages to the clipboard, clickable links, and more.

You can customize the default UI design and create a chat UI as you want.

Gifted Chat also includes support for Redux.

With 10K+ stars on GitHub, this is the chat library you need when you’re developing a chat component.

6. NativeBase — Cross-platform React Native Component Library

NativeBase is a good place for beginner React Native developers to start building their apps. It's a cross-platform React Native component library that offers customizable, ready-to-use components.

Their open-source projects include a Native starter app, a Twitter Clone app, and a tutorial app. They offer a set of premium starter kits as well.

NativeBase is also available as a boilerplate in Ignite CLI.

With 14.5K+ stars on GitHub, NativeBase is a component library that is very helpful to beginner React Native developers.

7. React Native Camera — Powerful Camera Features

React Native Camera (RNCamera) allows you to communicate with the device camera with a few simple functions without worrying about the native code. RNCamera supports photographs, videos, face detection, and barcode scanning. It also supports text recognition and can be installed in iOS via CocoaPods.

With 8.5K+ stars on GitHub, RNCamera is the go-to component when you need to implement camera functionality in a React Native app.

8. React Native Paper — Element Library with Light and Dark Themes

React Native Paper is an open-source library that offers components with the Material design standards. It is cross-platform and allows full theming support. There is also a dark theme available for the default theme, and you can seamlessly switch between the two themes. If you have customized the theme, you can use React Native’s Appearance API to implement theme switching depending on device settings.

Paper offers customizable and production-ready components and interactions that fit almost every use-case scenario.

With 7.5K stars on GitHub, this is a library that you can use to quickly develop a light and dark theme supported React Native app.

9. React Native Snap Carousel — For Highly Responsive Carousels

This library is a swiper/carousel component for React Native featuring previews, multiple layouts, parallax images, performant handling of a considerable number of items, and more. It’s both Android and iOS compatible. The library is well documented and contains tips and tricks for performance optimization and many other features.

With 8K+ stars on GitHub, this is a library to use when you need to add stylish sliders or carousels to your app.

10. React Native Elements — Cross-Platform UI Toolkit

React Native Elements is another extensive cross-platform UI toolkit with many contributed components. The library includes components such as avatar, pricing, badge, overlay, divider, social icon buttons, and more. There is also a demo app on Expo, developed using all of the React Native Elements components. Incredibly, all these can also be used in React Native Web apps.

With 20K+ stars on GitHub, this is a must-star component library for React Native developers.

Final Thoughts

In this article, I discussed 10 React Native component libraries useful for any React Native developer. These component libraries will save you time where you can focus on building your awesome app.

If you like to learn about the debugging tools for react native, refer to my article linked below;

That’s all for this article. Thank you for reading, and happy coding!