chakra-ui/apps/www/content/blog/00-announcing-v3.mdx

---
title: Announcing v3
description: Today, we're excited to announce the release of Chakra UI v3.0
type: release
version: "3.0"
authors: ["sage"]
publishedAt: "2024-10-22"
---

Today, we're excited to announce the long-awaited release of Chakra UI v3. The
feedback for Chakra v3 has been incredible and we appreciate those who took the
time to test and catch bugs.

Chakra v3 is a complete rewrite of Chakra to enhance it's performance, speed and
consistency across components. We've also added over 25 new components, and
that's just the beginning.

## Credits

Before giving you a quick overview, I'd like to start by acknowledging those
whose ideas and efforts contributed to the redesign of Chakra v3.

- **[Park UI](https://park-ui.com/)**: The groundwork by Christian and Phil laid
  the foundation of the design philiosophy in Chakra v3. Consistent sizing,
  colors, shadows, and naming convention is the heart and soul of a design
  system.

- **[Panda](https://panda-css.com/)**: The theming and styling APIs in Panda CSS
  created paved the way for Chakra v3's styling engine. The end goal was to make
  it almost effortless to switch between Park UI and Chakra UI.

- **[Radix Themes](https://www.radix-ui.com/themes)**: For inspiring the
  playground, composable animations and accent color system.

- **[Shadcn](https://ui.shadcn.com/)**: For inspiring the CLI and driving the
  idea of copy-paste snippets which Chakra now embraces.

We also want to appreciate these individuals have contributed consistently and
helped to shape v3.

[Christian Schröter](https://x.com/grizzly_codes),
[Esther Adebayo](https://x.com/_estheradebayo),
[Eelco](https://x.com/pagebakers), [Alex Stahmer](https://x.com/astahmer_dev),
[Tolulope Oyewumi](https://x.com/Delighteebrands),
[Abraham Anuoluwapo](https://x.com/anubra266),
[Ivica Batinić](https://x.com/_isBatak)

## Design Architecture

In Chakra v3, we're unifying our ecosystem of tools by combining the headless
library, Ark UI with the styling APIs in Panda CSS, then using Park UI as the
design system.

<Image
  src="/images/annoucement-image-frameworks.png"
  alt="Chakra v3 ecosystem"
  objectFit="contain"
  fill
  height="400px"
/>

We've redesigned most of the components from ground-up to ensure they are all
consistent and use design tokens in most cases.

## Semantic Tokens

Semantic tokens make it easy to personalize your token without having to restyle
every component by hand. Chakra v3 provides 7 semantic tokens for each color
palette, giving you ultimate flexibility without having to think about dark
mode.

- **solid:** The solid color of the palette

- **muted:** A muted version of the palette

- **subtle:** A subtle version of the palette, lower then the muted one.

- **emphasized:** A more pronounced version of the palette

- **contrast:** A color that goes on the solid background (also called
  "on-solid")

- **fg:** The foreground color of the palette

- **focusRing:** The focus ring color of the palette

<br />
Here's an example of using the red color in a semantic way that automatically
adapts to dark mode.

```tsx /red.subtle/ /red.fg/ /red.solid/ /red.contrast/
// A subtle version of red
<Box bg="red.subtle" color="red.fg">
  Welcome
</Box>

// A solid version of red
<Box bg="red.solid" color="red.contrast">
  Welcome
</Box>
```

To take this to the next level, you can leverage the new `colorPalette` feature.
It allows you create a color placeholder that be swapped to any color at any
depth on the DOM tree using CSS variables.

```tsx /colorPalette="red"/
<Box colorPalette="red">
  <Box bg="colorPalette.subtle" color="colorPalette.fg">
    Welcome
  </Box>
  <Box bg="colorPalette.solid" color="colorPalette.contrast">
    Welcome
  </Box>
</Box>
```

## Open by default

We moved away from closed components to open, compound components by default.
This makes it easier for you compose your own components and reduce the
maintenance on our end.

To illustrate the difference, here's how you'd create a checkbox in v2.

```tsx
<Checkbox>Click me</Checkbox>
```

Here's a contrived example of the checkbox component in Chakra v2.

```tsx
export const Checkbox = forwardRef(function Checkbox(props, ref) {
  const { children, iconColor, iconSize, icon, inputProps, ...checkboxProps } =
    props

  const checkbox = useCheckbox(checkboxProps)

  return (
    <chakra.label {...checkbox.getRootProps()}>
      <input {...checkbox.getInputProps(inputProps, ref)} />
      <chakra.span {...getCheckboxProps()}>
        <CheckIcon as={icon} color={iconColor} size={iconSize} />
      </chakra.span>
      {children && (
        <chakra.span {...checkbox.getLabelProps()}>{children}</chakra.span>
      )}
    </chakra.label>
  )
})
```

While the snippet above looks easy to use, you get to the point where
customization becomes a challenge. Questions like these often arise:

- how to pass props to the underlying icon?
- how to pass props to the label that renders the children?
- how to change the underlying animation of the checkbox?

This often leads to a component with many props that can be confusing to learn.

We've now made Chakra UI composable by default, this means you no longer get
closed components by default.

Here's how you'd create a checkbox with the new approach.

```tsx
<Checkbox.Root>
  <Checkbox.HiddenInput />
  <Checkbox.Control>
    <Checkbox.Indicator />
  </Checkbox.Control>
  <Checkbox.Label>Click me</Checkbox.Label>
</Checkbox.Root>
```

It's a lot more code and can be overwhelming to write. To account for this
slight tweak in DX, we've created the concept of "snippets" which can help you
wrap the composable checkbox and get you back to the initial v2 style.

Let me explain how it works:

## Snippets

By running the snippets CLI command, Chakra composes the components in Chakra
and puts it in your project. Giving you maximum control of every aspect.

```sh
npx @chakra-ui/cli@init snippets add
```

After running this you should see primitive components add to the
`components/ui/*` directory in your project.

```tsx
// components/ui/checkbox.tsx
export const Checkbox = forwardRef(function Checkbox(props, ref) {
  const { children, icon, inputProps, ...restProps } = props
  return (
    <Checkbox.Root {...restProps}>
      <Checkbox.HiddenInput {...inputProps} ref={ref} />
      <Checkbox.Control>
        <Checkbox.Indicator>{icon}</Checkbox.Indicator>
      </Checkbox.Control>
      {children && <Checkbox.Label>{children}</Checkbox.Label>}
    </Checkbox.Root>
  )
})
```

This makes it easy to achieve the same DX as v2 in v3.

```tsx
import { Checkbox } from "@/components/ui/checkbox"

const Demo = () => <Checkbox>Click me</Checkbox>
```

## Improve runtime performance

- **Remove runtime functions in theme:** Previously we allowed the use of
  functions in the theming system which could negatively impact runtime
  performance. We've now switched to a variant-based system called "recipes",
  largely inspired by Panda CSS.

- **Externalize styling engine:** The styling engine is initialized outside of
  the React tree and consumed by the components, providing a faster style
  resolution and rendering times in every component.

- **Migration to CSS animations:** We removed the `framer-motion` dependency in
  favor of using the platform's animation features. This gives us a performance
  boost and reduces the bundle size of your application.

## New components

We've added new components from Ark UI. These headless components are powered by
statecharts and work consistently across major frameworks. We truly believe the
future of UI libraries is framework-agnostic.

<Image
  src="/images/annoucement-new-components.png"
  alt="Chakra v3 ecosystem"
  objectFit="contain"
  fill
  height="400px"
/>

We also added new presentational components to save you time when building UIs.

## Embracing the ecosystem

We don't want to re-invent the wheel for common needs. In the spirit of this, we
removed a good number of modules from Chakra to keep us focused on delivering
best-in-class components.

- removed our icons in favor of a more robust icon library like `lucide-react`
  or `react-icons`
- removed our internal color mode management in favor of `next-themes` or
  `remix-themes`
- removed most hooks in favor of robust hook libraries like `react-use` or
  `use-hooks-ts`

## What's next

- Picker components from Ark: ColorPicker, DatePicker
- Redesigned Chakra UI Pro
- Redesigned Figma UI Kit
- Redesigned FigPilot: Our code generation tool for Figma that converts any
  design to Chakra compatible code.
- Explore the
  [React 19 style tag](https://react.dev/reference/react-dom/components/style)

## FAQs

### Does Chakra v3 use Panda internally?

No. To reduce the breaking change surface, we've decided to keep emotion (and
runtime css-in-js) to preserve the dynamic styling benefits. There's already a
lot of changes in v3, so we'll handle this progressively.

We might not even have to use Panda at all. The progress of the
[style tag](https://react.dev/reference/react-dom/components/style) in React 19
is very promising and we give Chakra even more performance boost without any
migration cost.

### Are we going to have all components from Ark UI?

Yes, Ark UI features a lot of useful components. We've included some of them
already in Chakra, but we'll bring in more interesting components like
`ColorPicker`, `DatePicker` over time.

### Do we really need to use the snippets?

No, you don't have to use the snippets if you're not a fan. We recommend doing
this though, it helps simplify your development experience since you'll anyway
have to do the same work on your end.

If you find the number of snippets overwhelming, remove the snippets you don't
need.

### Why the new logo?

The launch of v3 marks a new era for Chakra UI. The new era synchronizes Zag.js,
Ark UI and Panda CSS in a very unique way. This alone warrants a new story and
new brand.

### Why did it take so long to launch v3?

I ask myself the same question as well. It's an Herculean task to design the
foundations of Chakra UI in a way that is framework agnostic and entirely built
on statecharts. This hadn't been done before and took a lot of time to get that
stable. In the end, it was worth the effort and we appreciate your patience.

## Get started

We invite you to try Chakra v3 today and experience the delight of building user
interface with speed. **Get started with Chakra UI v3 now**

```sh
npm i @chakra-ui/react @emotion/react
```

Explore the [migration guide](/docs/get-started/migration) to upgrade your
project to Chakra UI v3.