In recent years, thanks to advancements in technology, websites and online content have been accessed by users in entirely different ways. Considering mobile and touch usage has hit an all-time high, it's no surprise that many users expect applications to be touch-centric. With the use of these devices only set to rise, if you're not optimizing for interaction with prospects and customers on these devices, you're missing out on a lot of opportunities to grow.
Creating a good user experience is critical for web and mobile applications, and a drag-and-drop feature is a convenient interface solution for adding interactivity to your web apps. It's often used to allow users to drag items around a web page, for example, from their desktop or smartphone, into a web application. This is especially important in UIs where users are required to rearrange items or move content from section to section.
A drag-and-drop feature doesn't just affect users' navigation or interaction with the content of your websites; it also has a bearing on the overall user experience of your web application and gives users a modern and interactive user experience. The ability to drag something from one location to another is a straightforward approach to doing numerous things.
In this roundup, you'll learn about the best drag-and-drop libraries for frontend developers to use when implementing drag-and-drop functionality in web applications. You'll look at these libraries based on their features and functionality, community and commercial support, developer experience, and ease of use.
Why Use a Drag-and-Drop Library
The HTML5 Drag and Drop API can typically be used to make different types of content and elements draggable on your page. However, utilizing drag-and-drop libraries over the more conventional HTML5 API implementation requires less effort to implement since the underlying logic is abstracted away. It enables easier feature-rich access to your content and a higher level of interaction with your users.
Plenty of open source libraries can help you create draggable and moveable elements, such as draggable lists, cards, and tables. The following libraries have been selected because they are easy to use, well-maintained, feature-rich, and time-saving when developing complex applications.
React DnD
The React DnD library enables you to implement complex drag-and-drop user interfaces in React applications while maintaining component independence. The user can move objects around the screen by grabbing them and dragging them using gestures. React DnD completely embraces React's declarative rendering paradigm and does not mutate the DOM. React DnD wraps your components and injects props as needed rather than offering ready-made widgets.
React DnD is highly extensible, and the backend can be customized based on touch events, mouse events, or custom events. The library is built on top of the HTML5 Drag and Drop API, and the source of truth in React DnD is data, not the view. Additionally, it's well-supported and maintained by the community.
A major drawback of React DnD is that the base package, react-dnd-html5-backend, doesn't support touch screens out of the box. You also need to install the react-dnd-touch-backend package in order to support touch devices.
The library is user-friendly and has over 18,000 stars on GitHub. Additionally, it receives over 1.3 million weekly downloads on npm and has become one of the most widely used libraries for adding drag-and-drop functionality to React apps.
For more React DnD examples, check out their GitHub page.
React-Draggable
One of the finest drag-and-drop implementation libraries in the React ecosystem is the React-Draggable library, which you can use if you need to implement the drag-and-drop feature in your React application.
The source code shows that its principle is straightforward, and it provides a draggable wrapper whose job is to package a component for dragging into the component you define. Then it recalculates the component's position and uses CSS transforms to move it when the mouse drags it.
The library uses a Draggable API to add draggability to the <Draggable/> component children and the CSS Transform property to move elements regardless of their current positioning or existing transform properties. The draggable component supports touch inputs and can also be used to implement grid layouts by passing a grid property.
In comparison with other drag-and-drop libraries, React-Draggable does an excellent job balancing functionality and ease of use. Most of the features you need to implement a simple draggable component are included in the library. In addition, the React-Draggable library is relatively stable and has rapidly outperformed several similar projects on GitHub, gathering over 7,000 stars and 3 million weekly downloads on npm. With so many projects using it, you can confidently use it in your project.
For more information, this demo app includes many use cases of the React-Draggable library.
react-beautiful-dnd
The react-beautiful-dnd is another library in the React ecosystem for implementing drag-and-drop functionality. There is a higher level of abstraction in the react-beautiful-dnd that is specifically designed for list items, which makes it ideal for unidirectional or one-dimensional layouts requiring horizontal or vertical drag-and-drop movements.
Its straightforward API makes the library easy to use, and it comes straight out of the box with keyboard accessibility. Additionally, it supports a variety of input methods, such as a mouse, keyboard, and touch. However, react-beautiful-dnd can be challenging to work with for lists that use Flexbox or dynamic layouts like grids.
The react-beautiful-dnd is state-driven and supports nested interactive elements. The library provides an intuitive and accessible drag-and-drop experience, with excellent documentation and plenty of examples. Atlassian, the team behind Jira, maintains this library with regular updates and support. In addition, it gets over 1.3 million weekly downloads on npm and has 27,000 stars on GitHub.
If you want to play around with the react-beautiful-dnd, there's a working demo available.
React dnd kit
The React dnd kit is a modular drag-and-drop toolkit that offers a lightweight, performant, accessible, and extensible way to build drag-and-drop interfaces. You can easily transform your components into draggable elements and droppable regions with nearly every capability available in the libraries mentioned earlier using only a few lines of code.
React dnd kit provides complete control over every aspect of how your droppable and draggable components should behave. You can choose to use only the features you want because it's developed as a monorepo that exposes a variety of packages and offers extensibility to create new functionality.
To enable drag-and-drop functionality for your components, the library provides a set of hooks, like useDraggable and useDroppable. These hooks allow you to add drag-and-drop functionality to your React apps without needing to redesign your application or create additional DOM node wrappers. The library supports many use cases, including lists, grids, games, and containers with multiple nested contexts. It also offers smooth interactions and animations, even on mobile devices, and is regularly updated.
It's possible to customize every aspect, including animations, styles, transitions, behavior, and constraints. Additionally, it has support for built-in inputs, such as a mouse, touch, and keyboard, or you can create your own custom inputs.
The library is an open source project that is maintained by the community, and it gets over 311,000 weekly downloads on npm and has 5,300 stars on GitHub. For more examples using the React dnd kit, check out their website.
SortableJS
SortableJS is a lightweight minimalist JavaScript library that utilizes the HTML5 Drag and Drop API to allow implementation of the drag-and-drop reorder as well as sort list items in modern browsers and touch devices. The library is easy to use and has support for most of the popular JavaScript frameworks, like React, Vue.js, and Angular.
Unlike the other React-specific libraries, you can use SortableJS to create drag-and-drop lists using vanilla JavaScript and HTML/CSS or any of the supported frameworks. There are also a lot of basic functionalities, including sorting, delaying, switching, making multiple drag-and-drop selections, and inverting.
In addition to supporting modern browsers, SortableJS also provides a fallback function for non-HTML5 browsers. There is support for a mouse and touch input, as well as drag handle selection and selectable text. It also supports smooth CSS animations, CSS transformations, and most CSS libraries, such as Bootstrap and Tailwind CSS.
The library gets over 1 million weekly downloads on npm and has over 25,400 stars on GitHub. Examples of how you can use SortableJS can be found on their GitHub page.
Dragula
With Dragula, there is no dependency on any other framework. It's an easy-to-use drag-and-drop library that supports vanilla JavaScript and modern frameworks, such as Angular and React, and is compatible with all modern browsers, including Internet Explorer 7+ (IE7+).
Dragula has drag handles for dragging elements, which fire up drag events only when the handles are held. The dragging of items is handled elegantly, with a shadow providing visual feedback on where the item will be dropped, and it automatically determines the sort order. In addition, there is a quick deletion feature available for when the drag button is released within a defined amount of time.
With most features you'll be looking for in a drag-and-drop library, the Dragula library is simple to use, and the drake component is the primary feature. This drake element is in charge of managing the drag-and-drop activities for a group of registered containers. Children of the container element can then be moved inside or between these containers. During drag-and-drop operations, the drake handles many events; the most important of which is drop, which invokes a callback when an item is dropped and provides the DOM element.
The library is also open source and maintained by a few contributors, with over 200,000 weekly downloads on npm and 21,000 stars on GitHub. You can find out more about Dragula on this GitHub repo.
Conclusion
Many web and mobile applications today want to ensure an excellent user experience. Having drag-and-drop functionality helps to improve the user experience by making the user's tasks easier and more efficient. If you're looking to offer this functionality, you can save a lot of time by using a drag-and-drop library that has been thoroughly tested.
In this article, you learned about some of the best and most useful drag-and-drop libraries and their key features so you can select the right one for your application.
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