Introduction

TanStack Table is a Headless UI library for building powerful tables & datagrids for TS/JS, React, Vue, Solid, Qwik, and Svelte.

What is "headless" UI?

Headless UI is a term for libraries and utilities that provide the logic, state, processing and API for UI elements and interactions, but do not provide markup, styles, or pre-built implementations. Scratching your head yet? 😉 Headless UI has a few main goals:

The hardest parts of building complex UIs usually revolve around state, events, side-effects, data computation/management. By removing these concerns from the markup, styles and implementation details, our logic and components can be more modular and reusable.

Building UI is a very branded and custom experience, even if that means choosing a design system or adhering to a design spec. To support this custom experience, component-based UI libraries need to support a massive (and seemingly endless) API surface around markup and style customization. Headless UI libraries decouple your logic from your UI

When you use a headless UI library, the complex task of data-processing, state-management, and business logic are handled for you, leaving you to worry about higher-cardinality decisions that differ across implementations and use cases.

Want to dive deeper? Read more about Headless UI.

Component-based libraries vs Headless libraries

In the ecosystem of table/datagrid libraries, there are two main categories:

• Component-based table libraries
• Headless table libraries

Which kind of table library should I use?

Each approach has subtle tradeoffs. Understanding these subtleties will help you make the right decision for your application and team.

Component-based Table Libraries

Component-based table libraries will typically supply you with a feature-rich drop-in solution and ready-to-use components/markup complete with styles/theming. AG Grid is a great example of this type of table library.

Pros:

• Ship with ready-to-use markup/styles
• Little setup required
• Turn-key experience

Cons:

• Less control over markup
• Custom styles are typically theme-based
• Larger bundle-sizes
• Highly coupled to framework adapters and platforms

If you want a ready-to-use table and design/bundle-size are not hard requirements, then you should consider using a component-based table library.

There are a lot of component-based table libraries out there, but we believe AG Grid is the gold standard and is by far our favorite grid-sibling (don't tell the others 🤫).

Headless Table Libraries

Headless table libraries will typically supply you with functions, state, utilities and event listeners to build your own table markup or attach to existing table markups.

Pros:

• Full control over markup and styles
• Supports all styling patterns (CSS, CSS-in-JS, UI libraries, etc)
• Smaller bundle-sizes
• Portable. Run anywhere JS runs!

Cons:

• More setup required
• No markup, styles or themes provided

If you want a lighter-weight table or full control over the design, then you should consider using a headless table library.

There are very few headless table libraries out there and obviously, TanStack Table is our favorite!