July 2026 - Base UI as the Default

Starting today, Base UI is the default component library in shadcn/ui .

First, a bit of history. When shadcn/ui launched in January 2023, it was built on Radix. At the time, nothing else came close. Unstyled headless components, great APIs, great accessibility, battle-tested in millions of apps.

Fast forward a few years and the same folks who built Radix are building something new: Base UI . They've done it once. Now they get to do it again, with everything they learned the first time.

Last year, Base UI tagged a beta and a lot of you asked if we are going to replace Radix with it. I said "the worst thing you can do for your production app is switch component libraries". I meant it, and it still holds. So instead of switching, we did the shadcn thing: we rebuilt every component for Base UI, kept the same abstraction, and let you choose. December brought npx shadcn create with both libraries.…