Reka UI is an MIT-licensed, open-source library of headless, accessible UI primitives for Vue, aimed at developers and design-system teams who want to build their own components rather than adopt a pre-styled kit — it was previously published as Radix Vue.
What it is
Reka UI is an open-source UI component library for building high-quality, accessible design systems and web apps for Vue. It is distributed on npm as reka-ui, documented at reka-ui.com, and maintained in the unovue organisation on GitHub. The repository carries the MIT licence and has drawn roughly 6,838 stars and 554 forks. Its own topic labels are explicit about its positioning: accessibility, accessible, component-library, design-system, headless, nuxt, primitives, ui, ui-components and ui-kit. The project is the renamed continuation of Radix Vue, and its credits acknowledge Radix UI, React Spectrum, Floating UI and Headless UI as the open-source works it builds on.
The concrete problem it solves is styling lock-in. Most Vue component kits ship opinionated markup and default visuals, so adopting one means fighting its CSS to match an existing brand. Reka UI replaces that with headless primitives: behaviour, keyboard interaction and accessibility wiring without visual styling, leaving the presentation layer to the team using it. For Vue developers it fills the role that Radix UI fills in React, and because it is the direct successor to Radix Vue, existing Radix Vue adopters are effectively already running this project under a new name.
Key capabilities
- Headless, unstyled primitives for Vue, published as the
reka-ui package and intended to be wrapped in an application's or design system's own styling.
- Accessibility as the organising principle rather than an add-on, reflected in the
accessibility and accessible topics and in the tagline's emphasis on high-quality, accessible design systems.
- Installation through the standard Vue toolchain with
npm install reka-ui, pnpm add reka-ui or yarn add reka-ui.
- First-class Nuxt relevance, signalled by the
nuxt topic alongside ui-components and design-system.
- A VitePress documentation site that can be run locally with
pnpm docs:dev and opened at http://localhost:5173.
- Component story development through Histoire with
pnpm story:dev, served at http://localhost:6006, and a test suite run with pnpm test.
- An open contribution path: pull requests are welcomed for core components, docs, tests and stories, with coordination through the project Discord at
chat.unovue.com.
Who uses it and how
- Vue application teams that need accessible interactive primitives but must ship a bespoke visual identity, wrapping the headless components in their own styles.
- Nuxt projects, where the library's Vue-native design and the
nuxt topic make it a natural fit for server-rendered or hybrid applications.
- Design-system maintainers who treat Reka UI as the behavioural layer beneath an internal component kit, keeping accessibility logic out of their own code.
- Teams already on Radix Vue, who are following the rename to
reka-ui rather than adopting a new dependency.
- Contributors building the library itself, who clone the repository, run
pnpm i and pnpm build, then use pnpm docs:dev or pnpm story:dev depending on whether they are working on documentation or on package components.
Getting started
Install the package with pnpm add reka-ui, npm install reka-ui or yarn add reka-ui. Full documentation, a getting-started guide and examples are published at reka-ui.com.
How it compares
No paid or hosted products are listed as alternatives in the available facts, so the comparison rests on the open-source works Reka UI credits: Radix UI, React Spectrum, Floating UI and Headless UI. Radix UI is the React design-system lineage this project follows and the source of its former name, while React Spectrum is Adobe's React-oriented component work and Floating UI supplies positioning behaviour. Reka UI is the Vue-facing member of that company, and it is the successor to Radix Vue rather than a competing fork of it.
When to use it — and when not to
Reka UI suits Vue and Nuxt teams that want to own their styling and are willing to build the visual layer themselves; a team expecting ready-made themes will have to write all of that CSS, because the primitives ship unstyled. Teams working in React are better served by the projects credited here, such as Radix UI or React Spectrum, since Reka UI is Vue-specific. Two honest caveats: the repository currently carries 284 open issues, which is a large backlog, and the README excerpt covers installation, releases and development setup rather than a full component inventory, so the actual component list has to be checked on reka-ui.com before committing to it.
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