I used this about a year ago when I went through a short Rails phase. I was a bit surprised not to see more Rails-specific UI libraries considering how batteries-included the rest of the framework is, and at the time I didn't really 'get' tailwind. I'm not in a Rails phase anymore, but nice work on the library!
Hey, thanks for giving it a shot! Agree on the UI front. It seems to be the most "unconventional" thing about the framework. Always struck me as odd, but I suppose it makes sense given how an app needs to adapt to a brand, audience, and market.
Agreed - particularly because there is an example of a login box and the screenshot of that is far more prominent than the rest of the design.
I don't think the demo should overpower the landing page.
And then it goes straight into themes. If I'm a Rails developer I'm not looking at theming, I'm looking for a conventional UI system that fits into Rails - stimulus, Hotwire, all that.
As far as I know, this site so far is just a bunch of specialised scaffolds for certain use-cases, but Rails itself has been capable of that the entire time.
Good feedback! This is a common misconception about themes. Rails UI is more of a hybrid as it offers UI components plus optional pages that build out a theme using those components.
You can either take the pages and tweak them for your own use case, or just use the UI components and skip the theme entirely. If you get a chance, try the free Ruby gem to see what I mean.
The login box is maybe confusing or maybe I'm misunderstanding you, it's actually UI for a login box, not actually where you login. I agree this area could be tightened up.
This is interesting to me as someone who worked with Rails a good deal back in the day and has interest in picking it back up.
Any chance of some themes that bring in a little dimension? Doesn't have to be early 2010s Bootstrap or anything but some subtle, crisp drop shadows and gentle gradients would be welcome.
Additionally, is unused Tailwind CSS shaken out or does it all come along for the ride?
Yes, it's on my radar to add more unique designs to the mix. Less typical, if that makes sense. For now, it's mostly a huge head start if you're building quickly.
And yes, unused Tailwind CSS is automatically extracted when it's built. For Rails, we use the tailwindcss-rails gem as a dependency for Rails UI, which JustWorks™.
If you’re showing off a UI framework, I shouldn’t be accidentally scrolling left and right on the page on mobile / my iPhone. Couldn’t be bothered to scroll down the page to look at components while accidentally activating horizontal scrolling.
Hey! A lot of the UI on the theme preview site and on railsui.com isn’t fully functional. It’s mostly there to show the design and layout of the components, not the underlying logic. The railsui gem itself has more complete, working components and pages.
i don't get these types of products anymore. i think they're useful in their own way, but i can literally create styles with claude/gemini in a heartbeat and not have to pay some insane fee.
Fair enough. Yes, AI can one-shot a lot now, but I sort of think human-coded stuff has its place. Having done both, I'm most often cleaning up the AI UI that did a piss poor job. I'm sure it can improve in time, though. I built this to scratch my own itch as I'm doing a lot of 0-1 development on ideas.
My guess is there's a lot of shops that don't want to mess with prompting AI to get to something clean and usable, and would rather just save money and pay the fee.
I wish I could use this – unfortunately UI frameworks are a political problem at every company I've worked at. The designers feel undermined or threatened by it, and product owners want to dictate design. Despite the massive productivity benefits of a UI framework, I've never been able to convince stakeholders to actually adopt one.
Hey I’m a designer and I love UI frameworks. Why design and build something from scratch if someone’s already doing it for you?
Unless there’s a very specific business case that requires a custom UI it’s not worth the hassle. I want to be delivering value for the business and for users, not maintaining a UI library.
One place I worked at had built an entire responsive CSS framework, which was hard to use and took a lot of maintenance. I threw it all out for Bootstrap (as was the style at the time). Some of the senior devs were upset I’d killed their baby, but everyone else was able to move so much faster.
Been there! I see this as a solo dev or small startup tool, great for building 0-1 ideas faster (which is what I use it for). Unless they’re working on greenfield apps, established teams probably aren’t the ideal fit.
Do you not use Tailwind? What is being wrapped? Designed and built this all as a Ruby gem, you can one-click install if you want to build prototypes with Rails even faster. I suppose you're not the target customer, but thanks for chiming in.
I'm not saying this product is good or bad, because I have no idea, but this is priced too low for it's claimed value prop, not too high. 25% of a decked out developer Macbook for something that sets the look and feel of an app and forestalls an entire designer hire is an unseriously low price.
I'm not saying the product is unserious; just that developers are generally unserious about pricing.
There are a bunch of those for free no ? Rails blocks (paid, about the same price as this Rails UI), Ruby UI (MIT licensed), I think I saw a couple more here.
> 25% of a decked out developer Macbook for something that sets the look and feel of an app and forestalls an entire designer hire is an unseriously low price.
Potential value bounds the price upper end, but alternatives set what the customer will actually pay. There are much more comprehensive tools of similar nature that are offered for free.
The (somewhat) unique value proposition it offers is in how it integrates into Rails, saving an hour of a developer's time — or a couple of minutes of an LLM's time, if the slot machine happens to work in your favour on that particular spin — required to manually do it themselves. That's worth something, but if you go too high it soon becomes more cost effective to just pay someone to put in that hour.
The repo was created in May 2023, and it seems like the bulk of commits were made in 2024, before vibe coding was really a thing. I think it's pretty harsh to dismiss projects in this manner.
In general, I like it for the speed. I can build an MVP in less than a weekend using Rails, Rails UI, and some AI for some one-shot copy and random repetitive stuff.
Under the hood, I like the Rails conventions and Ruby's beauty.
I might be missing something, but was this project started in 2016? I'm not sure what line in the sand you're drawing. That was some minima for developers "knowing UI actually matters" I presume?
I would make it clear in the landing page that the components are for demonstration purposes by adding a title like "For example" before them.
The above the fold looks a bit packed right now. I would leave the login box out until user presses top right as it's for retentive users only.
I don't think the demo should overpower the landing page.
And then it goes straight into themes. If I'm a Rails developer I'm not looking at theming, I'm looking for a conventional UI system that fits into Rails - stimulus, Hotwire, all that.
As far as I know, this site so far is just a bunch of specialised scaffolds for certain use-cases, but Rails itself has been capable of that the entire time.
You can either take the pages and tweak them for your own use case, or just use the UI components and skip the theme entirely. If you get a chance, try the free Ruby gem to see what I mean.
The login box is maybe confusing or maybe I'm misunderstanding you, it's actually UI for a login box, not actually where you login. I agree this area could be tightened up.
Any chance of some themes that bring in a little dimension? Doesn't have to be early 2010s Bootstrap or anything but some subtle, crisp drop shadows and gentle gradients would be welcome.
Additionally, is unused Tailwind CSS shaken out or does it all come along for the ride?
And yes, unused Tailwind CSS is automatically extracted when it's built. For Rails, we use the tailwindcss-rails gem as a dependency for Rails UI, which JustWorks™.
- table background moves left when table is scrolled horizontally
- actions in table and dropdown do nothing on tap
- text on buttons is selectable (really?)
otherwise looks cool though
My guess is there's a lot of shops that don't want to mess with prompting AI to get to something clean and usable, and would rather just save money and pay the fee.
Unless there’s a very specific business case that requires a custom UI it’s not worth the hassle. I want to be delivering value for the business and for users, not maintaining a UI library.
One place I worked at had built an entire responsive CSS framework, which was hard to use and took a lot of maintenance. I threw it all out for Bootstrap (as was the style at the time). Some of the senior devs were upset I’d killed their baby, but everyone else was able to move so much faster.
"Solo" plan is $299/year (1 seat), "Team" plan is $799/year (30 seats), larger plans are "inquire now".
I'm not saying the product is unserious; just that developers are generally unserious about pricing.
Potential value bounds the price upper end, but alternatives set what the customer will actually pay. There are much more comprehensive tools of similar nature that are offered for free.
The (somewhat) unique value proposition it offers is in how it integrates into Rails, saving an hour of a developer's time — or a couple of minutes of an LLM's time, if the slot machine happens to work in your favour on that particular spin — required to manually do it themselves. That's worth something, but if you go too high it soon becomes more cost effective to just pay someone to put in that hour.
i havent used it since 2006 opting for php and django
i might give it another shot, any reason you like this more than django or other frameworks
Under the hood, I like the Rails conventions and Ruby's beauty.
when will developers learn UI actually matters
bootstrap was a mistake, and lowered the bar for everyone