Evaluating web component libraries

• July 16, 2025
• 17 min. read

The modern web development landscape is characterized by a drive towards creating more modular, maintainable, and long-lasting applications. At the heart of this movement lies the Web Components specification, a suite of browser-native technologies designed to address the historical challenges of code reuse and framework lock-in. Understanding this foundation is essential for evaluating the libraries in this report.

The Philosophy of Web Components #

Web Components are not a framework, but rather a set of standardized APIs built directly into modern browsers. They are built on three core pillars that enable the creation of truly reusable user interface elements.

• Encapsulation: The Shadow DOM API is arguably the most powerful feature of Web Components. It provides a way to attach a hidden, separated DOM tree to an element. This "shadow root" encapsulates the component's internal structure and styling, meaning that CSS styles defined within the component do not leak out to affect the main page, and global page styles do not break the component's internal layout. This robust scoping mechanism allows developers to build self-contained components with simple, reliable CSS, free from the complexities of naming conventions like BEM or the need for CSS-in-JS solutions to avoid style collisions.
• Interoperability: The Custom Elements API allows developers to define their own HTML elements with custom tag names (e.g., <my-button>) and encapsulate their behavior within a JavaScript class. Because these are native browser features, they are inherently framework-agnostic. A component built as a Custom Element can be used in any HTML environment, whether it's a static site, a content management system, or an application built with React, Vue, Angular, or Svelte.
• Reusability & Future-Proofing: By building on web standards, components become durable assets. Unlike framework-specific components, which are tied to the lifespan and versioning of a particular framework, web components are designed to be future-ready. An organization can invest in building a design system or a library of shared components with the confidence that they will remain usable for many years, even if the underlying application frameworks change.
• Reusability & Future-Proofing: By building on web standards, components become durable assets. Unlike framework-specific components, which are tied to the lifespan and versioning of a particular framework, web components are designed to be future-ready. An organization can invest in building a design system or a library of shared components with the confidence that they will remain usable for many years, even if the underlying application frameworks change.

Positioning the Libraries #

The three libraries under review: Lit, Wired Elements, and Shoelace are not direct competitors but rather represent different layers within the Web Component ecosystem. Their relationship is hierarchical, which is a critical distinction for any technical evaluation.

• Lit as the Foundation: Lit is not a library of components, but a library for building them. It is officially described as a "simple library for building fast, lightweight web components". It provides a minimal, efficient base class (LitElement) and a declarative templating system (lit-html) that significantly simplify the process of creating custom elements from scratch. Lit is the tool for the component author.
• Shoelace and Wired Elements as Implementations: Both Shoelace and Wired Elements are collections of pre-built web components that are themselves built using Lit. This means that choosing to use Shoelace or Wired Elements is implicitly an adoption of Lit's core rendering technology and philosophy. They provide ready-to-use UI elements, saving developers from having to build common components like buttons, cards, and inputs themselves.

The existence of such diverse and successful libraries built upon Lit is a strong testament to the power and flexibility of the underlying foundation. The fact that a single base library can enable both a professional, enterprise-grade UI kit like Shoelace and a niche, aesthetic-focused tool like Wired Elements demonstrates its maturity and capability. This vibrant ecosystem indicates that Lit is not merely a theoretical tool but a practical and robust choice for a wide spectrum of development needs.

Lit: The Foundation for Modern Web Components #

Lit, maintained by Google as the successor to the Polymer Project, is a lightweight library designed to make it easier to build fast, high-quality web components. It sits directly on top of the Web Components standards, adding a thin layer of developer-friendly features to reduce boilerplate and enhance productivity without sacrificing the performance and interoperability of the native platform.

Core Concepts and Architecture #

Lit's architecture is centered around three key features that work together to provide a modern development experience.

• LitElement Base Class: The cornerstone of Lit is the LitElement class. Developers create their own components by extending this class, which is itself a convenient wrapper around the native HTMLElement. This base class handles the component's reactive update cycle, abstracting away much of the manual boilerplate required when working with the raw Custom Elements API.
• lit-html Declarative Templates: Lit uses JavaScript's native tagged template literals for defining a component's HTML structure. A template is created by prefixing a template literal string with the html tag.
• This approach has a significant performance advantage over frameworks that use a Virtual DOM (VDOM). Instead of creating a complete virtual representation of the DOM and diffing it against the real DOM on every update, lit-html parses the template once, identifies the dynamic parts (e.g., where {this.name} is), and creates direct bindings to those specific DOM nodes. On subsequent updates, it only touches the parts of the DOM that have actually changed, resulting in extremely fast and memory-efficient rendering.
• Reactive Properties: To manage state, Lit provides a reactive properties system. When a class field is declared as a reactive property (using the @property decorator in TypeScript or a static properties block in JavaScript), Lit automatically observes it for changes. Whenever the value of a reactive property is modified, the component automatically schedules an update, re-rendering its template with the new state. This declarative model greatly simplifies state management and eliminates the need for manual render calls.

Strengths: The Case for Building with Lit #

• Performance and Size: Lit's most cited advantage is its exceptional performance and minimal size. Weighing in at only around 5-6 KB (minified and compressed), it adds negligible overhead to an application's bundle size, which is critical for fast initial load times. Its rendering engine, which avoids VDOM diffing in favor of targeted DOM updates, is blazing fast at runtime.
• Interoperability and Low Lock-in: Since every Lit component is a standard web component, it is fundamentally interoperable. These components can be dropped into any webpage, regardless of the tech stack, from plain HTML to a complex React application. This makes Lit an ideal choice for creating shareable components or entire design systems that need to serve multiple teams using different frameworks. The library's low coupling means there is no centralized scheduler or state manager, making it easy to adopt Lit incrementally or migrate away from it one component at a time if needed.
• Developer Experience: While more low-level than a full framework, Lit provides what its creators call "just what you need to be happy and productive". It smooths over the rough edges of the native Web Component APIs, handling complexities like attribute-to-property reflection and providing a clean event-handling syntax (@click=${...}). This results in a development experience that is far superior to writing vanilla web components while remaining close to the platform. Furthermore, Lit does not require a compiler or a complex toolchain to get started; it can be used directly from a CDN.

Weaknesses and Strategic Considerations #

• Lifecycle Complexity: Web components adhere to a specific set of lifecycle callbacks (connectedCallback, disconnectedCallback, attributeChangedCallback) that are part of the web standard. While powerful, this lifecycle is more complex to manage than the simpler onMount/onUnmount hooks provided by many JavaScript frameworks. Developers using Lit must still understand and correctly manage this underlying complexity, especially for cleanup tasks like removing event listeners to prevent memory leaks.
• Server-Side Rendering (SSR): SSR remains the most significant challenge for the web component ecosystem, and Lit is no exception. Multiple sources acknowledge that SSR is "not a solved problem" in the web components world. The fact that Lit's official SSR package remains in the experimental "Lit Labs" section underscores that it is not yet considered a mature, production-ready feature. This is a critical limitation for any project that relies on SSR for performance or SEO.
• Ecosystem and Tooling: While Lit itself is stable and well-supported by Google, its surrounding ecosystem of third-party tools, libraries, and ready-made solutions is smaller and less mature than those of established frameworks like React or Vue. While you can start without any tools, a production-grade workflow will likely still involve setting up a bundler, a linter, and a testing framework.

A crucial strategic point to understand is that Lit is a library, not a framework. It is intentionally minimal and scoped only to the task of authoring components. It does not provide solutions for application-level concerns such as routing, internationalization, or advanced global state management. While experimental packages like @lit-labs/context exist for passing data through a component tree, they are not intended as a replacement for a full-fledged state management library in a complex application. Therefore, a team choosing Lit is not just choosing a component authoring tool; they are also committing to making separate, deliberate architectural decisions for all other aspects of their application. This offers ultimate flexibility but also requires more architectural planning compared to adopting an all-in-one framework.

Wired Elements: A Niche Aesthetic for Unique Interfaces #

Wired Elements occupies a unique and specific niche in the component library landscape. It is not designed for mainstream application development but rather to provide a distinct, hand-drawn aesthetic for specialized use cases.

Core Philosophy and Technology #

The defining characteristic of Wired Elements is its visual style, which is explicitly designed to look "hand-drawn" and "sketchy". This effect is achieved through the use of the

RoughJS, a graphics library that draws shapes with a sketchy, imperfect appearance. Under the hood, these sketchy visuals are rendered inside standard web components that are built using Lit as their base.

A key feature of this approach is its intentional randomness. Just like two shapes drawn by hand are never identical, "no two renderings [of a Wired Element] will be exactly the same".

Clarifying a Point of Confusion: Wired Elements vs. Wire Elements Pro #

It is important to address a potential source of confusion arising from a similarly named but entirely unrelated product.

Wired Elements: This is the open-source, framework-agnostic web component library that is the subject of this report. Its purpose is to provide a sketchy, hand-drawn UI aesthetic. It is built with Lit and RoughJS.

Wire Elements Pro: This is a separate, commercial product that provides a suite of UI components specifically for the Laravel and Livewire (PHP) ecosystem. It has no relation to the sketchy aesthetic or the

The components from wiredjs.com include modals, slide-overs, and other elements designed to integrate with a PHP backend. This report will focus exclusively on the former.

Strengths: The Case for a Sketchy Look #

• Unique Aesthetic: The library's primary strength is its visual identity. It is an excellent choice for projects where a standard, polished corporate look is undesirable. Its most common use cases are for creating wireframes, mockups, and interactive prototypes.
• Focus on Functionality: The deliberately sketchy style has a practical benefit in the early stages of a project. It can help guide feedback from clients, managers, or beta testers away from cosmetic details and toward the core functionality and user flow of the application.
• Simplicity: Wired Elements is very easy to use. The library can be installed from npm or loaded directly from a CDN with a single <script> tag, making it accessible for quick projects and experiments.

Weaknesses and Strategic Considerations #

• Extremely Niche Application: The library's greatest strength is also its most significant weakness. The hand-drawn style, while charming, is inappropriate for the vast majority of production web applications. It is not intended for use in enterprise software, e-commerce sites, or any context that requires a professional and trustworthy appearance.
• Limited Component Set: The library provides a basic set of UI controls, including buttons, inputs, checkboxes, cards, and sliders. However, this collection is not comprehensive and lacks the more complex components (like data tables, date pickers, or rich text editors) found in production-focused libraries.
• Not Production-Grade: Wired Elements is best considered a tool for prototyping or for small, creative projects. It is not built with the same rigorous focus on accessibility, theming, and performance under stress that is expected of a library intended for large-scale, production deployment. The fact that searches for its production use yield results about industrial wiring harnesses is a telling indicator of its niche status in professional web development.

Shoelace: A Professional, Production-Ready Component Library #

Shoelace positions itself as a "forward-thinking library of web components," designed from the ground up to provide a robust, professional, and framework-agnostic foundation for building modern user interfaces. It stands in stark contrast to Wired Elements, targeting enterprise-level applications and design systems.

Core Philosophy: The "Forward-Thinking" Library #

The core goal of Shoelace is to solve the problem of framework-specific component libraries, which are inherently limited by the lifespan and evolution of their parent framework. By building on the web standards that underpin web components, Shoelace provides a durable set of UI building blocks that can be used consistently across an organization's projects, even if those projects use different frameworks like React, Vue, or Angular. The library is built with a strong emphasis on professional requirements: accessibility, deep customizability, and a high-quality developer experience.

Strengths: Why Choose Shoelace for Production? #

• Comprehensive and Polished Component Suite: Shoelace offers a large and mature collection of components that cover the vast majority of UI needs for a modern web application. The library includes everything from basic elements like buttons, inputs, and badges to complex, interactive components like dialogs, drawers, color pickers, and carousels. The components are professionally designed and considered "well-made and maintained" by the community.
• Extreme Customizability: A key strength of Shoelace is its powerful and multi-layered theming and customization API. This allows teams to adapt the components to precisely match their brand identity.
• Design Tokens: At a high level, the entire library can be themed by overriding a set of global CSS custom properties (e.g., --sl-color-primary, --sl-font-size-medium). This allows for broad changes to color, typography, spacing, and border-radius with minimal effort.
• CSS Parts: For more granular control, Shoelace components expose their internal elements as "parts" that can be targeted with the ::part() CSS pseudo-element (e.g., sl-card::part(base) or sl-button::part(label)). This is a robust, stable way to style the internals of a component without relying on fragile DOM structure selectors, which could break as the library evolves.
• Component-Specific Properties: Some components also expose their own local CSS custom properties for even more specific tweaks, such as changing the size of an avatar (sl-avatar { --size: 6rem; }).
• Accessibility-First Design: Shoelace is explicitly "built with accessibility in mind," addressing keyboard navigation, ARIA attributes, and other critical concerns for creating inclusive applications. This is a major differentiator and a requirement for most professional and public-facing websites.
• True Framework Agnosticism: As a library of standard web components, Shoelace works natively with any framework or even with no framework at all. To improve the developer experience, the project also provides official wrappers for React, which smooth over some of the ergonomic differences between React's synthetic event system and native DOM events.

Weaknesses and Strategic Considerations #

• Flash of Unstyled Content (FOUC): Like all web component libraries that are defined via JavaScript, Shoelace is susceptible to FOUC. This is a phenomenon where the browser briefly displays the raw, un-styled custom element tag (e.g., <sl-button>) before the component's JavaScript has loaded and rendered its Shadow DOM. While there are mitigation strategies, such as pre-styling the base element to be hidden, they are often considered a "bandaid" on a problem inherent to the current state of the technology.
• Native Form Integration Challenges: This is a well-known limitation of the Web Components standard itself. By default, a custom element with an input inside its Shadow DOM will not be associated with a parent <form> element. This means that form submission and validation do not work out of the box. Shoelace, like other component libraries, has to implement its own custom form submission logic, which may require developers to handle form data manually with JavaScript rather than relying on standard browser behavior.
• Dependency on Lit: Shoelace is built on Lit. While the maintainer correctly argues that Lit is an implementation detail and the final output is standard web components, some developers express concern about this dependency chain. The choice of Shoelace is also a bet on the continued stability and performance of Lit. While this is currently a very safe bet given Lit's backing and quality, it is a valid strategic point to consider for long-term projects.
• Server-Side Rendering (SSR) Limitations: As it is built on Lit and uses Shadow DOM, Shoelace shares the same SSR challenges. Its use of adoptedStyleSheets for performance is not compatible with Declarative Shadow DOM, the primary mechanism for serializing shadow roots on the server. This makes achieving true, efficient SSR with Shoelace difficult and is a significant hurdle for applications that require it.

Head-to-Head Comparison and Use-Case Suitability #

While Lit serves as the foundation for the other two, comparing them as distinct choices reveals their radically different goals and ideal applications. A developer's choice depends entirely on the task at hand: are they building the bricks, building a blueprint, or building a house?

Feature Comparison of Lit, Wired Elements, and Shoelace #

The following table provides a high-level, at-a-glance comparison of the three libraries across key technical and strategic axes. This format is designed to help decision-makers quickly synthesize the detailed analysis from the previous sections.

Analysis: What to use when? #

• For Building a New Design System from Scratch: Lit is the unequivocal choice. It provides the optimal foundation for creating a bespoke set of high-performance, framework-agnostic components. Its minimal nature ensures that the final design system has no unnecessary dependencies and gives the development team full control over the API and implementation of every component. While Shoelace can be used as an excellent accelerator or starting point for a design system—saving immense time and cost—Lit is the tool for those who need to build the fundamental bricks themselves.
• For Rapidly Prototyping or Wireframing an Idea: Wired Elements is the ideal tool for this specific job. Its sketchy aesthetic is perfectly suited for creating functional mockups that encourage stakeholders to focus on user flow and functionality rather than getting distracted by visual polish. Its simplicity allows for extremely fast assembly of a prototype's UI.
• For Building a Production Enterprise Application: Shoelace is the clear winner in this category. It offers a "best of both worlds" solution: the speed and convenience of a pre-built component library like Bootstrap or Material-UI, combined with the framework-agnostic longevity of web standards. Its comprehensive set of polished, accessible, and deeply customizable components allows teams to build professional-grade applications much faster than if they were to build each component from scratch with Lit.

The Evolution of Shoelace: Understanding Web Awesome #

In 2022, the creator of Shoelace joined Font Awesome, a move that has secured the library's future and set it on a path of significant evolution. This has resulted in a rebranding and the introduction of a new commercial tier, which are important factors for any team considering adopting the library.

Shoelace is Now Web Awesome Free #

The first major outcome of this partnership is the rebranding of Shoelace to Web Awesome. It is critical to understand that this is more than just a name change; it represents a new chapter for the library. The core project, encompassing everything that was previously available in Shoelace, continues to exist as Web Awesome Free. The team has explicitly committed that this core will "always be free, always open source" under the permissive MIT license. This ensures that the vibrant community and the thousands of projects built on Shoelace can continue to thrive and upgrade with confidence.

Web Awesome Pro: The Commercial Offering #

Alongside the free core, the team has introduced Web Awesome Pro, a commercial, subscription-based offering designed to fund the project's continued development and provide additional value for professional teams. The Pro tier is an extension of the free version, following a classic "open core" business model.

Key features exclusive to Web Awesome Pro include:

• Pro-only Components: A set of more complex components aimed at enterprise use cases, such as a responsive layout engine, a data grid, and charts.
• Pro Theme Builder: A powerful online tool that allows teams to define their brand's logo, fonts, and a single primary color, and then automatically generates a complete, unique, and fully accessible color palette and theme for their components.
• Pro Pattern Library: A growing collection of pre-built, copy-and-paste layout patterns that can be used to assemble websites and applications much faster.
• Professional Support and Services: Subscribers get access to dedicated technical support and hosted services.

The pricing model, revealed through a successful Kickstarter campaign, is a yearly subscription (e.g., an early-bird price of $99/year). A key feature of this model is that subscribers also receive a permanent license to the last version of Web Awesome Pro released during their active subscription. This hybrid approach provides the continuous updates of a subscription service while mitigating the risk of losing access to the software if the subscription is cancelled.

This open-core model is a significant strength for teams considering the library for long-term, critical projects. A common risk with open-source software is project abandonment due to maintainer burnout or lack of funding—a concern that even the creator of Shoelace acknowledged was a factor in his decision to build on the more established Lit. By creating a sustainable business model around the project, Font Awesome ensures that there is a paid, professional team dedicated to maintaining and improving both the free and pro versions of the library. This transforms Web Awesome from a popular open-source project into a reliable, commercially-backed piece of infrastructure, significantly de-risking its adoption for enterprise use.

Recommendations and Conclusion #

Lit, Wired Elements, and Shoelace are different layers of the development process. The decision of which to use is not a matter of which is "best" in a vacuum, but which is the most appropriate tool for the specific task, team, and project goals.

• Choose Lit when: The primary objective is to create a new, bespoke design system or a set of highly optimized, reusable web components from the ground up. Lit is the ideal choice for teams that require maximum control over the component API, prioritize raw performance and minimal dependencies, and have the development resources to invest in building their own abstractions. It is the power tool for component authors who value future-proofing their work against framework churn and want to build directly on top of web standards.
• Choose Wired Elements when: The goal is to rapidly create a wireframe, an interactive mockup, or a playful, non-corporate user interface. Its unique sketchy aesthetic is its main feature, serving to de-emphasize visual polish and encourage a focus on core functionality during early-stage reviews. It is a specialized brush for a specific artistic or prototyping purpose and is not intended for mainstream, production-grade applications.
• Choose Shoelace / Web Awesome when: The project involves building a professional, production-grade application where development speed and UI quality are paramount. Shoelace provides a comprehensive, accessible, and highly customizable component library that drastically accelerates development. It is the optimal choice for teams that want the benefits of a robust UI kit without tying themselves to a specific JavaScript framework. The evolution into Web Awesome, with its commercially backed open-core model, adds a layer of long-term stability and professional support, making it an exceptionally safe and powerful choice for enterprise environments.

Conclusion #

The web component ecosystem matured a lot since they were first introduced, moving from a promising but difficult-to-use standard to a practical and powerful option for modern web development. The relationship between the three libraries evaluated in this post illustrates this evolution.

Lit provides a solid, performant, and developer-friendly foundation that makes the once-daunting task of authoring web components accessible and efficient. On top of this foundation, libraries like Wired Elements and Shoelace can flourish.

Wired Elements shows the creative potential, enabling unique aesthetics for specialized purposes.

Shoelace, now Web Awesome, represents the pinnacle of this ecosystem's potential for professional applications. It demonstrates that web components are no longer just for shareable leaf nodes but can form the basis of a complete, enterprise-ready design system that is both durable and delightful to use.

The choice depends on the project's needs. Lit is the engine, Wired Elements is a custom body kit, and Shoelace is the fully-assembled, luxury vehicle. Understanding this hierarchy is the key to selecting the right tool for the job and leveraging the modern web component standard.

• Javascript,
• Web Components

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