// the find
ElemeFE/element
A Vue.js 2.0 UI Toolkit for Web
Element UI is a Vue 2 component library originally built by the Ele.me (Chinese food delivery) frontend team. It covers the full range of admin-dashboard components — tables, forms, date pickers, dialogs, trees — and was the dominant choice for Vue 2 enterprise internal tools for years. It is effectively in maintenance-only mode now; the Vue 3 successor is Element Plus, maintained by the community.
The component breadth is genuinely impressive — 70+ components including edge cases like Cascader, Transfer, and InfiniteScroll that most libraries skip. The theming system uses SCSS variables throughout, so you can restyle the whole library by overriding a handful of tokens without forking anything. Tree-shaking via named imports works cleanly, so you're not forced to bundle the whole thing. Documentation is available in four languages with live interactive demos, which was ahead of its time when this launched.
Vue 2 reached end-of-life in December 2023, so you are building on a dead runtime — security patches are not coming. The icon set is a custom font icon (icomoon), not SVG, which means no tree-shaking on icons and no easy colorization tricks. The built-in Table component collapses under large datasets with no virtualization; if you need to render thousands of rows, you'll be patching it yourself or reaching for a third-party wrapper. Starting a new project on this in 2026 is a mistake; migrate to Element Plus or pick something else entirely.