GreatUI: copy-paste animated React components

Every Tailwind project eventually hits the moment where the layout and palette are fine but the page still reads as an admin panel. GreatUI (Great UI) is a React component library maintained by Saurabh Sharma that bets on the part most libraries skip: motion. All 50 components ship as shadcn registry entries — one npx shadcn command writes the .tsx source straight into your project, the code is yours, and nothing is added to your dependencies at runtime. What separates it from shadcn/ui is that 15 of those 50 components are page transitions and animated theme switches, a category shadcn/ui doesn’t cover at all. The repo went up in July 2026 and had 268 stars as of October 12, 2026.

Core features

• Copy, paste, and you own it: every component is a shadcn registry record (/r/<name>.json), and npx shadcn@latest add writes the .tsx file into components/ui/. Tweak the class names or delete half the logic without touching node_modules.
• Transitions as a system: motion is the biggest slice of the catalog — 15 page and theme transitions — and the dark-mode toggle itself becomes the animation. That’s the gap shadcn/ui leaves open.

• Catalog and install: the site’s catalog lists 56 components across 8 categories, 50 of which have a shadcn install command; the 4 WebGL shaders and 2 demo components (Animated Select, ASCII Image) are view-only.

Category	Count	Examples
Visuals	13	MacBook mockup, floating dock, terminal loader
Page Transitions	11	curtain, pixel, venetian blinds, cascade
Typography	8	text reveal, word focus scroll
Layout & Cards	8	accordion, team section
Social Cards	5	Twitter and Instagram lookalikes
Shaders	4	liquid ripple, cyber glitch
Theme Transitions	4	circular wipe, blur fade
Buttons	3	minimal buttons

Counts come from the site’s lib/registry.ts, checked October 12, 2026; the installable 50 are exactly what the shadcn registry exposes.

• Typed and accessible: everything is TypeScript, each component page on the site documents its props with types and defaults, the README claims WAI-ARIA compliance, and both light and dark modes ship high-contrast variants.
• A current stack: Tailwind CSS v4 and React 19, with animation on motion (the package formerly known as Framer Motion). The shadcn command installs declared dependencies for you.

Typical use cases

• An indie developer polishing a landing page or side project: lift a social card, a device mockup, or a whole page transition instead of spending the evening tuning easing curves.
• An existing Next.js app that wants one or two effects: swapping only the dark-mode toggle for the circular wipe costs far less than adopting an entire library.
• Anyone who wants to read how transitions work: each component is a single source file, and watching it orchestrate motion’s AnimatePresence beats reading the docs.

Quick start

You need a React or Next.js project with Tailwind already configured. Taking the accordion as an example:

npx shadcn@latest add https://www.great-ui.com/r/accordion.json

The command drops Accordion.tsx into components/ui/ and pulls the declared motion dependency into package.json. Pick any component from the site’s components page and swap accordion in the URL for its slug; every component page has an interactive preview, so look before you copy, and the site’s changelog page tracks new arrivals.

Summary

GreatUI fits frontend and full-stack developers who know their way around Tailwind and want to add motion to a React interface without adopting a full component library; for production-grade basics like forms, tables, and dialogs, shadcn/ui is still the fuller shelf. Three things to know first. The repo is one maintainer, created in July 2026, at 268 stars as of October 12, 2026, and the Blocks (prebuilt sections) promised on the site are still marked “Coming soon”. The README badge says MIT, but the LICENSE file in the repo is a custom agreement: personal and commercial use is fine (the text explicitly covers SaaS and end-user apps), but repackaging the components as a UI kit or template for resale is not — read the LICENSE before shipping commercially. And transitions overdose easily; Anthropic’s frontend-design skill warns that animation needs a reason, so one well-placed transition beats one in every section. GreatUI pairs naturally with Refero Styles: that one gives you real websites’ design languages as reference, this one gives you motion source code you can actually ship.