Element UI

Element UI is a full-featured component library for Vue.js 2, providing dozens of production-ready desktop UI components — forms, tables, date/time pickers, dialogs, navigation, and more — under a consistent design language with built-in theming support via theme-chalk. It was built by Eleme (China’s largest food-delivery platform) and became one of the most widely adopted Vue 2 component sets, powering countless admin panels and internal tools.

The project explicitly states it will stay on Vue 2.x, with the team recommending Element Plus for Vue 3 projects. It remains a solid, stable choice for any application still on the Vue 2 stack, offering a mature, battle-tested component set with internationalization support and extensive documentation.

What You Get

• 60+ Vue 2 components spanning forms, navigation, data display, feedback, and layout
• A built-in theming system (theme-chalk) with Sass variables for customizing the visual design
• Form validation integration via el-form with rule-based validators
• Data table, tree, cascader, and transfer components for complex data-entry and data-display UIs
• Internationalization support with locale packs for many languages
• TypeScript typings and a web-types.json for editor autocompletion

Common Use Cases

• Building admin dashboards and back-office management panels on Vue 2
• Rapidly assembling CRUD-heavy business applications with consistent form and table components
• Building internal tools that need data tables, filters, and multi-step forms out of the box
• Maintaining legacy Vue 2 applications that need a mature, stable UI kit rather than a Vue 3 migration

Under The Hood

Architecture - The repository is a component monorepo under packages/, with each UI component (button, table, cascader, etc.) as its own directory containing its Vue single-file component and styles, while src/ holds shared mixins, directives, locale infrastructure, and transitions used across components. packages/theme-chalk is a separate Sass-based theming package that all components consume, which is how the library achieves consistent, overridable styling across the entire set.

Tech Stack - Vue.js 2, built with a Webpack-based build pipeline (build/ scripts) that compiles to CommonJS, ES module, and UMD bundles, plus a Karma+Mocha test runner for browser-based unit tests and a separate SSR test suite (test/ssr). Gulp handles theme compilation from Sass to distributable CSS.

Code Quality - The test/unit/specs directory contains per-component spec files mirroring the packages/ structure, giving broad (if Vue-2-era) coverage across the component set, and ESLint is run as part of the test script itself. As a long-lived, widely-adopted project, the codebase shows some accumulated inconsistency in patterns across older vs. newer components, and development activity has slowed significantly since the project settled into Vue 2 maintenance mode.

API Design - Components follow a consistent el-* naming and prop convention across the entire library (e.g., v-model, size, disabled behave the same way on nearly every input component), which keeps the learning curve low once a developer learns a few components. Documentation is extensive with live, editable examples for every component, though some newer Vue ecosystem conventions (Composition API) are absent since the library predates and intentionally does not adopt Vue 3 patterns.