Design System Options for Rails

Summary

Design system options for Rails You would think that picking a well-made design system for your application is a solved task in 2025. But not for Rails and therefore not for Business Class. When I started Business Class, there wasn't really a thing to adopt and somehow it still feels the same. Building design systems I am not a big designer, although I do try to improve in this regard (I bought the book Refactoring UI from the authors of Tailwind, among other things) and I have been part of implementing a design system a few times. The last time we were implementing it from scratch for Phrase with ViewComponent library. I was originally thinking that Business Class should just adopt something that's already out there, because building things from scratch are super time-consuming. However, the choices weren't convincing at the time and I just started with Bulma. Later with the release of Tailwind 3 I made a switch and build a simple design with plain Tailwind and @apply . I think the basic design works well, but it's not a component design system people might expect to work with in 2025. So let's reevaluate our options for the future and if we can finally pick something already made. Component systems for Rails There are still only a couple of options we can truly consider for Business Class. Please note that I can only include free or at least freemium design systems, not paid ones. shadcn/ui Shadcn/UI is an open-source collection of beautifully designed, reusable UI components built on top of React, Tailwind CSS, and Radix UI. It provides clean, accessible, and customizable building blocks that help developers quickly create modern web applications. Shadcn/UI emphasizes simplicity, developer experience, and adherence to industry-standard best practices, making it easy to integrate into various projects and workflows. Since it's made for React you would use it like this: import { Accordion, AccordionContent, AccordionItem, AccordionTrigger, } from "@/components/ui/a...