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saadeghi/daisyui
🌼 🌼 🌼 🌼 🌼 The most popular, free and open-source Tailwind CSS component library
daisyUI is a Tailwind CSS plugin that adds semantic component class names (btn, card, modal, etc.) on top of Tailwind's utility classes, shipping 35+ themes and 60+ components. It's framework-agnostic CSS — works with any HTML, Svelte, React, Vue, whatever. The target audience is developers who want opinionated, pre-styled components without leaving the Tailwind ecosystem.
The CSS-only approach is the right call: no JS runtime, no framework lock-in, and your bundle size doesn't grow per-component. The theming system is genuinely well thought out — 35 built-in themes using CSS custom properties, and the theme generator lets you produce a custom theme by tweaking OKLCH color values rather than hunting through a dozen variables. The test coverage on the build pipeline functions is thorough; every transform step (CSS compilation, class extraction, plugin generation) has its own test file. Active maintenance is real — pushed yesterday, 41k stars, and v5 was a substantial rewrite, not just a version bump.
The semantic class names are also the trap: once you write `btn btn-primary` everywhere, swapping to a different UI library means touching every template file. The component set has gaps that matter in real apps — no date picker, no combobox/autocomplete, no data table with sorting. The countdown and carousel components are CSS-only parlor tricks that break the moment you need real interactivity. Also, the docs site has a paid 'Blueprint' product mixed in, which muddies the open-source story slightly.