Mantine UI offers a stellar developer experience, but its popularity is challenged by the market dominance of early players like MUI, the “good enough” principle, and the architectural shift towards headless UI. Here’s a breakdown of why the best tech doesn’t always win and how to choose the right tool for the job.

So, Why Isn’t Everyone Using Mantine in 2025? A Senior Engineer’s Take.

I remember it clear as day. It was 2018, and a junior engineer, sharp as a tack, came to me practically vibrating with excitement about a new state management library. It was elegant, tiny, and promised to solve all the boilerplate headaches we had with Redux. We tried it on a non-critical internal project. Six months later, the original author got a new job at a FAANG company, the GitHub repo went silent, and we spent a miserable two sprints ripping it out and replacing it with the “boring” incumbent. That memory is branded on my brain every time someone asks, “Why aren’t we using [The Shiny New Thing]? It’s so much better!”

And that’s exactly the conversation happening around Mantine. I see it on Reddit, on Twitter, and in our own team’s Slack. And let me be clear: the hype is justified. Mantine is an incredible piece of engineering. Its hooks-based approach is brilliant, the documentation is clean, and the out-of-the-box components are a massive productivity boost. So why isn’t it the undisputed king, dethroning giants like Material-UI (MUI) or Ant Design?

The “Why”: It’s Not About Code, It’s About Gravity

The best technology doesn’t win on its merits alone. It wins when its “escape velocity” is high enough to overcome the gravitational pull of the incumbents. Mantine is a powerful rocket, but it launched into a solar system with a few Jupiter-sized planets already in orbit.

• The First-Mover Advantage: MUI and Ant Design were here first. They have years of Stack Overflow answers, tutorials, third-party libraries, and paid themes. For a large enterprise, that ecosystem represents safety. It’s the modern-day version of the old saying, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”
• The Hiring Pool Problem: When you need to scale a team from 5 to 50, it’s a lot easier to find developers with “React & Material-UI” on their resume. Choosing a less popular library, however good, is a business risk that shrinks your potential talent pool.
• The Headless Revolution: While Mantine was perfecting the all-in-one component library, a different architectural pattern was gaining steam: headless UI (Radix, Headless UI) paired with utility-first CSS (Tailwind). This approach gives teams maximum control over styling and functionality, appealing to design-focused companies. Mantine finds itself in the tough middle ground—more flexible than the old guard, but less “pure” than the headless approach.

This isn’t a technical problem you can fix with a pull request. It’s a market problem. So, how do we, as engineers in the trenches, decide what to do?

The Playbook: 3 Paths for Choosing Your UI Library

At TechResolve, we don’t have a “one size fits all” rule. Instead, we match the strategy to the project. Here are the three main paths we take.

Path 1: The ‘Enterprise Standard’ (Stick With The Devil You Know)

This is our default for large, long-term customer-facing applications. We stick with something like MUI. Is it the most exciting? No. Is the developer experience as smooth as Mantine? Absolutely not. But is it predictable, stable, and easy to hire for? Yes.

When to use it: Core products, systems with a 5+ year lifespan, projects where team scalability is more important than initial development speed.

Think about maintaining the billing portal for prod-billing-app-01. You want stability over novelty. You want to be able to pull in a contractor in six months and have them be productive on day one. Here, the massive ecosystem is a feature, not a bug.

import Button from '@mui/material/Button';

function DeactivateUserButton() {
  // The code is verbose, but every React dev has seen it.
  // There are a million examples online if you get stuck.
  return <Button variant="contained" color="error">
    Deactivate Account
  </Button>;
}

Path 2: The ‘Greenfield Advantage’ (Embrace Mantine)

This is where Mantine shines. When we’re spinning up a new internal dashboard, a proof-of-concept, or a tool for a specific department, we often choose Mantine. The goal here is maximum velocity.

When to use it: Internal tools, new projects with a small, dedicated team, situations where shipping fast is the top priority.

The productivity gains are undeniable. Building a complex form with validation, a date picker, and notifications can take half the time compared to other libraries. We accept the smaller community size because the team is small and skilled enough to solve its own problems, and the documentation is good enough that we rarely need to look elsewhere.

Pro Tip: Before you go all-in on a newer library like Mantine for a critical project, do your due diligence. Check the GitHub repo for recent commits, look at the number of open issues, and get a feel for the community’s health. A vibrant but small community is better than a dead one.

import { useForm } from '@mantine/form';
import { TextInput, Button, Box } from '@mantine/core';
import { notifications } from '@mantine/notifications';

function NewProjectForm() {
  const form = useForm({
    initialValues: { name: '', owner_email: '' },
    validate: {
      owner_email: (value) => (/^\\S+@\\S+$/.test(value) ? null : 'Invalid email'),
    },
  });

  // This is just so clean. The logic is co-located and easy to follow.
  const handleSubmit = (values) => {
    // api.createProject(values)...
    notifications.show({ title: 'Success', message: 'Project created!' });
  };

  return (
    <Box component="form" onSubmit={form.onSubmit(handleSubmit)}>
      <TextInput label="Project Name" {...form.getInputProps('name')} />
      <TextInput label="Owner Email" {...form.getInputProps('owner_email')} />
      <Button type="submit" mt="md">Create Project</Button>
    </Box>
  );
}

Path 3: The ‘Nuclear Option’ (Go Headless + Tailwind)

Sometimes, the requirements from the design team are so specific and unique that any pre-built component library would mean a constant battle with overriding styles. This is the “hacky but effective” solution pushed to its limit. In these cases, we abandon component libraries altogether.

When to use it: Brand-defining public websites, applications with a bespoke design system, when you need 100% control over markup and style.

This approach gives you ultimate power, but with great power comes great responsibility. You are now responsible for accessibility, state management for every dropdown, and every other detail. It’s slow to start, but for the right project, it results in a cleaner, more maintainable codebase in the long run because you’re not fighting a third party’s opinions.

import * as DropdownMenu from '@radix-ui/react-dropdown-menu';

// This is just the Radix structure. All styling is done via Tailwind classes.
// Total control, but you build everything from scratch.
export const ProfileMenu = () => (
  <DropdownMenu.Root>
    <DropdownMenu.Trigger asChild>
      <button className="rounded-full w-10 h-10 bg-gray-200">DV</button>
    </DropdownMenu.Trigger>

    <DropdownMenu.Portal>
      <DropdownMenu.Content className="bg-white p-2 shadow-lg rounded-md">
        <DropdownMenu.Item className="p-2 hover:bg-blue-500 hover:text-white">
          Settings
        </DropdownMenu.Item>
        <DropdownMenu.Item className="p-2 text-red-600 hover:bg-red-500 hover:text-white">
          Log Out
        </DropdownMenu.Item>
      </DropdownMenu.Content>
    </DropdownMenu.Portal>
  </DropdownMenu.Root>
);

So no, Mantine probably won’t be the “most popular” UI library in 2025. And that’s okay. The real question isn’t “Which library is the best?” but “Which library is the right tool for this specific job, with this specific team, on this specific timeline?” The day we stop asking that question is the day we stop being engineers and start being dogma-driven followers.

Darian Vance

Lead Cloud Architect & DevOps Strategist

With over 12 years in system architecture and automation, Darian specializes in simplifying complex cloud infrastructures. An advocate for open-source solutions, he founded TechResolve to provide engineers with actionable, battle-tested troubleshooting guides and robust software alternatives.

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