react-bits

An open source collection of animated, interactive & fully customizable React components for building memorable websites.

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Inspiration

Building engaging websites often requires animations and micro-interactions, but developers usually face two problems:

  1. Writing animations from scratch is time-consuming.
  2. Existing libraries are either too opinionated or lack flexibility.

We wanted to create a library of beautiful, production-ready, and fully customizable React components that anyone can plug in instantly while still keeping control over the design.

What it does

React Bits is a collection of 110+ animated and interactive React components—including text animations, UI elements, and dynamic backgrounds.

  • Each component is responsive, lightweight, and customizable via props.
  • Works with multiple setups: JS-CSS, JS-Tailwind, TS-CSS, TS-Tailwind.
  • Easy to install using shadcn CLI or jsrepo CLI.
  • Provides developers with ready-to-use building blocks for creating memorable user experiences.

How we built it

  • Frontend: Built entirely with React + TailwindCSS (and CSS variants).
  • Design System: Focused on modularity, reusability, and customization.
  • Installation Support: Integrated shadcn and jsrepo for fast component importing.
  • Ecosystem: Structured components into categories like Text, Animations, Components, Backgrounds to simplify discovery.
  • Open Source Workflow: GitHub Discussions + Issues to gather community feedback and iterate quickly.

Challenges we ran into

  • Ensuring components stayed lightweight and performant even with complex animations.
  • Supporting multiple framework variants (JS/TS + CSS/Tailwind) without duplicating too much code.
  • Maintaining accessibility—for example, deciding how to implement prefers-reduced-motion consistently across all animations.
  • Handling contributions and scaling the repo as it grew beyond 100+ components.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Building one of the largest open-source React animation/component collections with over 24k GitHub stars.
  • Achieving cross-framework compatibility without sacrificing developer experience.
  • Creating a community-driven ecosystem, where developers actively request features, report issues, and share usage ideas.
  • Launching a Vue counterpart (vue-bits.dev) to expand beyond React.

What we learned

  • The importance of balancing customization with simplicity—developers want flexible props, but not overwhelming complexity.
  • Performance matters—optimizing animations for both high-end and low-end devices.
  • Open source is about more than code—it’s about community support, feedback loops, and contribution culture.
  • Accessibility must be baked in from the start, not treated as an afterthought.

What's next for react-bits

  • Expand to more categories like charts, loaders, and advanced layouts.
  • Improve accessibility features, including built-in support for prefers-reduced-motion.
  • Build a website playground where developers can preview, customize, and copy components in real time.
  • Add framework adapters (e.g., Next.js/Remix starters) for easier integration.
  • Continue to grow the community contributions to make react-bits the go-to library for animated React components.

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