It looks good, but I'll be honest, it's hard for me to consider $299/$799 if I can buy a beautiful theme off of somewhere like ThemeForest for $20 or $30 and toss it into an LLM to get the files parsed into components and templates.
That's fair. Probably not a good fit for you then. I wanted to keep the human element alive where I could with this project and I know AI will likely take all our jobs, so be it. It's solving a need for me when it comes to building ideas quickly so I figured maybe others would benefit. I'm a product designer by day and love building front-ends so it's also a passion project.
For sure, and I definitely like the visual eye of designers, which is why I'm referring to designs created by humans (and to be honest, LLMs do an amazing job of creating decent looking designs).
I guess the bigger question is even ignoring the LLM angle is why this project is worth 10-30x than another design also created by a human. I feel like the Ruby gem and integration is worth a premium, but I'm not sure that the premium matches what you're charging. I've purchased third party themes and paid someone on Upwork to "Railsify" them, leaving me with ownership of the code, and I'm pretty sure I paid less than you're charging for the team level. (I hope you don't take this as a personal attack on your business model, and simply an analysis of X vs Y)
I hear you. I'd say the value prop is drop-in integration and customization with Rails, time-saving design (useful for 0-1 or early-stage ideas for non-design-savvy folks), and fewer headaches compared to adapting other components or themes in the wild into a Rails app.
No matter what you choose, there's work to be done to adapt to each app's use case, branding, copywriting, etc. Rails UI definitely isn't "complete" and is a constant work in progress, hence the subscription model.
Whether that's valuable to you is definitely up to you. Some folks don't want to be beholden to an AI for design and prefer a ready-made human-engineered system to refer back to and evolve as their app does.
I use this project for my own stuff. That's why I originally built it; however, I'm biased and am deeply on the Rails bandwagon. Ultimately, it saves me a bunch of time, which to me is the most valuable thing there is.
Hello fellow Houstonian! As someone who has used Stimulus and Hotwire since the early days of Rails 7, I don't really agree that it's 10-30x, because I wouldn't compare it to some $30 theme. Having Rails-ified components (and themes) saves a lot of time so this would more than pay for itself within a few hours of consulting work on a project in the USA. I've worked on projects that had talented designers, but I also know the feeling of being a solo dev who doesn't want to figure out how to make it look and behave nicely, so for someone like that it's extra awesome!
You don’t even need to do that anymore. It’s capable of visiting those sites and just copying the components look and feel. Try it. Ask it to make a template based on a theme you found and show it the link to the demo and BaM! You got something similar.
It's really weird to me how people on this site used to have a much bigger problem with ripping off other people's designs and work, but the minute it became turnkey it was like, "sorry art nerd guess you starve now roll coal".
It wasn't that many years ago when startups or open source software were being built on the back of stealing others' art: Napster, Mega, Bit Torrent, etc. Not everyone, but forums like this were filled with apologists claiming it was the fault of those rights owners for not making their content available cheaper.
For sure. I was just trying to frame the conversation in the context of "done for you", and to implement all of the features in a given theme or UI framework would be a time investment, even if it's not "hard".
This definitely does fill a gap that Rails has. I love using it but man I can't make a nice looking front end to save my life. We've used Tailwind UI a ton but thats kind of a foot gun because you end up slightly tweaking classes all over the place if you're not disciplined.
I've fiddled with Open Props [0] a bit lately, seems like a nice middle ground! Colours/fonts/spacing/etc that look nice together are there, but it's still up to you to use them. (And you're still writing CSS, so might be a deal breaker if that's the part of tailwind you like... but CSS is rather nice nowadays.)
I used this about a year ago when I went through a short Rails phase. I was a bit surprised not to see more Rails-specific UI libraries considering how batteries-included the rest of the framework is, and at the time I didn't really 'get' tailwind. I'm not in a Rails phase anymore, but nice work on the library!
Hey, thanks for giving it a shot! Agree on the UI front. It seems to be the most "unconventional" thing about the framework. Always struck me as odd, but I suppose it makes sense given how an app needs to adapt to a brand, audience, and market.
I've launched 3 Rails SaaS products in the last 6 months, all profitable. In the world of LLMs things like this feel less valuable. I can kick off a Claude Code prompt and in 1 hour have a decent design system with Rails components.
Things like this likely need to be AI-first moving forward. This feels built for humans.
Personally, if I feel like you vibe coded your SaaS I’m probably not gonna pay for it. You can obviously tell when a project is vibe coded just based on the way it looks, the weird bugs you see and the poor documentation.
There’s definitely a market for good looking UI that actually works and stands out from the vibe coded junk. Artisanal corn fed UI I guess.
Same here. This was human driven UI. I used AI sparingly for mostly architecture decisions on the gem. Otherwise all by hand. I'm a product designer by trade.
That's fair. I think there's a future where some folks won't want AI to generate all the things. I replied to another comment before but this was very little AI minus some architecture direction of the underlying ruby gem.
Maybe they used AI to make this ? But really though I hope they didn't and did some of designing themselves... I'm worried we are approaching a world where we never get new human designs just regurgitated designs from pre 2025.
I used AI sparingly actually. Mostly just some help for Ruby gem architecture and how to approach swapping themes on the fly otherwise all me. I'm a product designer by day so this stuff I do constantly.
Definitely aware. I built it to scratch my own itch to be honest. I'm going the non AI route with it. Lotta slop out there. I'm sure it will improve but I'm fine with this being a side gig.
If you’re showing off a UI framework, I shouldn’t be accidentally scrolling left and right on the page on mobile / my iPhone. Couldn’t be bothered to scroll down the page to look at components while accidentally activating horizontal scrolling.
It's switching components every 8 seconds, like a carousel. It's a bit unfair to judge Rails UI by that, but I agree, it's not a good first impression.
Agreed - particularly because there is an example of a login box and the screenshot of that is far more prominent than the rest of the design.
I don't think the demo should overpower the landing page.
And then it goes straight into themes. If I'm a Rails developer I'm not looking at theming, I'm looking for a conventional UI system that fits into Rails - stimulus, Hotwire, all that.
As far as I know, this site so far is just a bunch of specialised scaffolds for certain use-cases, but Rails itself has been capable of that the entire time.
Good feedback! This is a common misconception about themes. Rails UI is more of a hybrid as it offers UI components plus optional pages that build out a theme using those components.
You can either take the pages and tweak them for your own use case, or just use the UI components and skip the theme entirely. If you get a chance, try the free Ruby gem to see what I mean.
The login box is maybe confusing or maybe I'm misunderstanding you, it's actually UI for a login box, not actually where you login. I agree this area could be tightened up.
Wow, didn't realize that you're the one behind the Webcrunch channel. Never got into Rails but I loved your Affinity videos back in the day, you're also one of the functional CSS/Tailwind early adopters on YT.
That's where I discovered TW back in 2018 I think. It was even before the Refactoring UI book and videos and the first official version of TW.
Did a quick search and no-one has flagged a11y/colour/contrast but the animating effect for the brand colour often had a colour contrast around the 1.0 range.
Yeah pretty much didn't care about it for the sake of effect. That's a big no no I know. The website isn't really the focus as the goods in the ruby gem are more of the focus. Consider railsui.com a billboard if you will.
This is interesting to me as someone who worked with Rails a good deal back in the day and has interest in picking it back up.
Any chance of some themes that bring in a little dimension? Doesn't have to be early 2010s Bootstrap or anything but some subtle, crisp drop shadows and gentle gradients would be welcome.
Additionally, is unused Tailwind CSS shaken out or does it all come along for the ride?
Yes, it's on my radar to add more unique designs to the mix. Less typical, if that makes sense. For now, it's mostly a huge head start if you're building quickly.
And yes, unused Tailwind CSS is automatically extracted when it's built. For Rails, we use the tailwindcss-rails gem as a dependency for Rails UI, which JustWorks™.
Pretty much drop in for rails specific UI. Much of it is HTML which could definitely carry over to Django with a little work or one shot conversion with your favorite AI tool of choice.
Looks great, and honestly not sure why something like this doesn't come out of the box in rails (it includes the kitchen sink for the most part sans ui)
One suggestion I'd make is to disable the autorotation of ui elements on your main page, it's unintuitive and has a frustratingly short timeout before cycling to the next ui element.
i don't get these types of products anymore. i think they're useful in their own way, but i can literally create styles with claude/gemini in a heartbeat and not have to pay some insane fee.
Fair enough. Yes, AI can one-shot a lot now, but I sort of think human-coded stuff has its place. Having done both, I'm most often cleaning up the AI UI that did a piss poor job. I'm sure it can improve in time, though. I built this to scratch my own itch as I'm doing a lot of 0-1 development on ideas.
My guess is there's a lot of shops that don't want to mess with prompting AI to get to something clean and usable, and would rather just save money and pay the fee.
Hey! A lot of the UI on the theme preview site and on railsui.com isn’t fully functional. It’s mostly there to show the design and layout of the components, not the underlying logic. The railsui gem itself has more complete, working components and pages.
Full-stack Rails has been my day job pretty much exclusively for almost twenty years now, for both long-term projects and one-offs in agency contexts. So I am generally interested.
Two things put me off:
1) I have to hunt around to find out whether this would fit into my project, dependency and workflow-wise — turns out it doesn't. I use neither Hotwire nor Tailwind, and "latest Rails point release only" is a rather harsh restriction too.
IMO, this information should replace the fluffy marketing speak in "Who is Rails UI for?" right at the top of railsui.com/docs .
2) Absolutely every paid product should have a pricing link in the top nav, spelled out in large, friendly letters. If the landing page only implicitly implies "paid product" but is then going to be sneaky about that fact, I close the tab and do not come back; in this case, I only stuck around because it's a Show HN.
Oh, and _that_ perennial topic ... a subscription? No thank you. Especially for the kind of money you're asking, I expect a perpetual license for the version at time of purchase, plus at least a year of updates.
It's like $15 a month annualized. We add new themes and components quarterly. If that's too steep you're not the target customer. Thanks for chiming in.
I wish I could use this – unfortunately UI frameworks are a political problem at every company I've worked at. The designers feel undermined or threatened by it, and product owners want to dictate design. Despite the massive productivity benefits of a UI framework, I've never been able to convince stakeholders to actually adopt one.
Hey I’m a designer and I love UI frameworks. Why design and build something from scratch if someone’s already doing it for you?
Unless there’s a very specific business case that requires a custom UI it’s not worth the hassle. I want to be delivering value for the business and for users, not maintaining a UI library.
One place I worked at had built an entire responsive CSS framework, which was hard to use and took a lot of maintenance. I threw it all out for Bootstrap (as was the style at the time). Some of the senior devs were upset I’d killed their baby, but everyone else was able to move so much faster.
The last time I heard this from a designer, the designs we got constantly violated the UI framework in ways that required deep customization.
I'd love to have a designer that started with a style guide and then actually stuck with it. Writing CSS isn't hard, and sticking with a known set of rules makes it even easier. But then this one component needs a slightly different font size that doesn't match up to any of the established typography rules, and this other spot needs unique padding, and and and I end up having to waste so much time looking for these little surprises.
Been there! I see this as a solo dev or small startup tool, great for building 0-1 ideas faster (which is what I use it for). Unless they’re working on greenfield apps, established teams probably aren’t the ideal fit.
I'm so tired of this kind of design -- that basic dev tool splash page/Tailwind-y/Shadcdn UI thing that's just seemingly everywhere nowadays. It's so basic and tired, like Material Design without any of the little bits of personality that make it decent.
Give me some life and color and personality, damn it.
I hear you and it's coming up next. I needed/wanted to lay ground work for stuff that's easier to tweak to match your own branding. Many Rails apps are similar in niche so I tried to compensate on that front.
Do you not use Tailwind? What is being wrapped? Designed and built this all as a Ruby gem, you can one-click install if you want to build prototypes with Rails even faster. I suppose you're not the target customer, but thanks for chiming in.
My apologies if this came off as too condescending and harsh. I’m coming from the receiving end of an app which uses Tailwind and many developers run wild with class-soup in their changes, causing all sorts of inconsistency.
Still, does not justify the caustic comment. And I’ll be spending this entire weekend obsessing on how to do better.
I'm not saying this product is good or bad, because I have no idea, but this is priced too low for it's claimed value prop, not too high. 25% of a decked out developer Macbook for something that sets the look and feel of an app and forestalls an entire designer hire is an unseriously low price.
I'm not saying the product is unserious; just that developers are generally unserious about pricing.
There are a bunch of those for free no ? Rails blocks (paid, about the same price as this Rails UI), Ruby UI (MIT licensed), I think I saw a couple more here.
Pricing per seat makes little sense for a component library. It forces every party involved in building an application to acquire a license, not just a designer who might otherwise have been hired once to provide the assets. Seat-based pricing suits tools people daily drive (Figma, Slack), whereas asset libraries are better priced by what you ship with them.
A more natural unit for pricing would be per domain, application, environment, or similar.
That said, I'm aware several UI frameworks have moved toward seat-based licensing recently, so it must be working for them in some sense.
> 25% of a decked out developer Macbook for something that sets the look and feel of an app and forestalls an entire designer hire is an unseriously low price.
Potential value bounds the price upper end, but alternatives set what the customer will actually pay. There are much more comprehensive tools of similar nature that are offered for free.
The (somewhat) unique value proposition it offers is in how it integrates into Rails, saving an hour of a developer's time — or a couple of minutes of an LLM's time, if the slot machine happens to work in your favour on that particular spin — required to manually do it themselves. That's worth something, but if you go too high it soon becomes more cost effective to just pay someone to put in that hour.
The repo was created in May 2023, and it seems like the bulk of commits were made in 2024, before vibe coding was really a thing. I think it's pretty harsh to dismiss projects in this manner.
I have purchased Tailwind UI in the past, but for Rails developers, Rails UI goes the extra mile as this sentence on the JavaScript page explains:
Rails defaults use Stimulus.js and Turbo from the Hotwire ecosystem. Rails UI follows these conventions and includes pre-built Stimulus controllers for common UI patterns.
In general, I like it for the speed. I can build an MVP in less than a weekend using Rails, Rails UI, and some AI for some one-shot copy and random repetitive stuff.
Under the hood, I like the Rails conventions and Ruby's beauty.
You’re overlooking Hotwire, PWA as a first-class concept, and Hotwire Native — the easiest way to take a functioning web app and migrate it to native mobile apps on both iOS and Android. I’d encourage you to take a fresh look at the new Rails technologies introduced in Rails 7 and Rails 8. You may find that the current Rails stack is the best fit for most, though not all, cloud applications that need a web client along with iOS and Android clients.
In 2024, I launched for a client a Rails platform powered by Hotwire that has thousands of users. Thanks to Jumpstart Rails working out of the box with Jumpstart iOS and Android, the web app views were reused in native iOS and Android apps which drastically sped up initial launch and reduces ongoing maintenance. In other words, much less effort than if I had used Rails as an API with React or something similar.
And I've kept my eyes on Rails UI since it was in beta, and I was poking around with it a couple weeks ago and the cool thing is it could be used on a project like the one above without clashing with anything.
I might be missing something, but was this project started in 2016? I'm not sure what line in the sand you're drawing. That was some minima for developers "knowing UI actually matters" I presume?
This looks infinitely better than yet another, generic web styling framework. Not sure what kind of "gotcha" you've implied here. Also, the page consumes 10x time less resources.
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