Bulma is a modern, open-source, and CSS-based design framework. It provides a set of widgets, utilities, and standardized styles that allow developers to quickly create responsive and user-friendly websites. Bulma emphasizes on mobile-first designs and provides a clean and consistent look-and-feel to your website. As it is built using CSS, developers have the freedom to use it with any front-end library or framework of their choice.
Semantic UI React is a popular library that provides a set of reusable React components for building user interfaces. It is based on Semantic UI, a comprehensive CSS framework that offers a wide range of pre-designed UI elements and styles.
Both Bulma and Semantic UI React are popular choices in the UI/UX community. Bulma has gained significant popularity due to its simplicity and lightweight nature. Semantic UI React, on the other hand, is highly regarded for its comprehensive set of pre-built components and ease of use.
Design and Styling
Bulma provides a clean, minimalistic, and responsive design out-of-the-box. It offers a flexible grid system, CSS-only components, and customizable themes. Semantic UI React offers a wide range of pre-designed components with a more opinionated and visually rich design, making it suitable for projects that require a more polished and expressive look.
Integration with React
Semantic UI React is built specifically for React and provides fully functional and reusable React components. It follows React best practices and is seamlessly integrated into React projects. Bulma, on the other hand, is a CSS framework that can be used with any JavaScript framework, including React. While there are third-party libraries and wrappers available for using Bulma with React, it requires more manual integration.
Customization
Bulma offers extensive customization options through its SASS variables. This allows developers to easily modify the framework's default colors, sizes, and other styles. Semantic UI React provides theming support through its theming API, allowing for customizing the appearance of components with ease. Both libraries offer decent customization capabilities, but Bulma provides a more granular level of customization.
Community and Documentation
Both Bulma and Semantic UI React have active communities and good documentation. Bulma has a large community of contributors and offers comprehensive documentation with examples and guides. Semantic UI React also has an active community and provides detailed documentation, including a live component playground and interactive examples.
Performance
Bulma relies solely on CSS and does not introduce any additional JavaScript overhead, making it very lightweight and performant. Semantic UI React, being a React library, includes JavaScript behavior and state management, which can impact performance compared to a purely CSS-based solution like Bulma. However, the performance difference is usually negligible unless working with a large number of components or complex UI interactions.