Today, Chakra UI crossed 40k GitHub stars and I'm deeply grateful to the community and those who stuck with us over the years.
It's been over 6 years since Chakra first launched its v0 version and boy! It has been an incredible ride. Full of twists and turns, acceptance and resistance, excitement and burnout. Despite all that, I'm extremely proud of what we've built over the years.
What started as a "quick" side project has become much bigger and now has 4M downloads per month. To everyone who contributed in the past and present, thank you. You've made this possible.
The Journey
The journey hasn't been smooth. Rewriting everything as state machines with Zag.js almost broke me a few times. But it was the right call. Chakra has grown beyond what Initially imagined and given birth to new projects like Ark UI and Panda CSS.
Looking back at the evolution:
- 2019: v0.1 Started as a wrapper around Styled System
- 2020: v1.0 launched with a complete rewrite and Chakra's own styling system
- 2021: Grew to 20k stars and became widely adopted
- 2022: v2.0 released with React 18 support, began rebuilding with state machines
- 2023: Launching Ark UI and Panda CSS foundations
- 2024: v3.0 stable release with framework-agnostic architecture
- 2025: 40,000 stars and 4M monthly downloads
Each milestone represents countless hours from contributors, maintainers, and the community. Every PR, bug report, and Discord message has shaped Chakra into what it is today.
Thank You
To everyone who opened a PR, reported a bug, answered questions in Discord, or just picked Chakra for your next project—thank you. You built this as much as I did.
Special shoutout to Christian and Esther for their incredible contributions and unwavering support ❤️
What's Next
Can't wait to share what we have planned for 2026. We're doubling down on:
- Removing Emotion: Eliminating runtime CSS-in-JS for better performance
- Date Picker Primitives: Finally bringing native date selection components
- Pleasant Surprises: 🤫
The best is yet to come. Let's keep building 🥳
Join us in Discord to celebrate, or star us on GitHub if you haven't already!