Compared, 10 September 2026
Everyone here gates something. We gate one thing.
Nine paid catalogs, read off their own pricing pages. Eight of them sell you the source: you can look at a component, and the code is the purchase. One sells agent access by subscription.
Every row carries the day it was read, because a sweep never lands all nine: some vendors put pricing behind a login, some move the page. The last sweep was and reached 7 of 9. Nothing on this page is older than .
Hoverlab sells neither. 1,126 effects, 307 blocks, 126 pages, 32 templates and 36 designer tools are readable, customisable and copyable without an account, and the API and MCP server are open to anyone. What $79 buys is the right to ship what you copied in something commercial — which is the only thing here that was ever really being withheld.
Their prices are list prices in their own currency and they move. Ours are computed from the catalog on every build, so the counts above are what is live right now rather than what was true when this page was written.
Where they beat us
Five things you would find out in an afternoon of tab-opening. If any of them is the thing you are buying on, buy theirs.
- Block depth
- Preline ships 780 blocks and Shadcnblocks 1,858. We are a fraction of both, and blocks are what buyers actually compare.
- Design files
- Untitled UI, Flowbite, Shadcnblocks and Preline all ship Figma — and Preline and Flowbite now give theirs away free. We ship every section as importable Figma frames, plus Dev Mode pairing, which is a better workflow once you are working. What we do not ship is a component library: no variants, no auto-layout, nothing to swap an instance of. Untitled UI sells 10k components with variants and we have frames, so this row still goes to them.
- Composition
- Ours now drags, reorders, duplicates, restyles every section at once and opens the result as a running project — and it does all of that without an account, where Shadcnblocks locks its builder to the $399 Elite tier. What theirs still do and ours does not is edit the CONTENT of a section: change the heading, swap the image, retype the price. That one is not a roadmap item, because blocks here take no props — they are files you leave with and change in your editor, and a prop panel would be a second, worse editor for the same text. It is still a thing a buyer will compare and find missing.
- Free tiers
- Preline gives away 640 components, 189 blocks, five templates and its whole Figma system without an account. Our free offer is still broader — everything readable, plus the API and MCP — but "free" stopped being ours alone.
- Team pricing
- Untitled UI reaches $8,999 with a private repo, Storybook and SSO. Our ladder stops well short of that, and so does what it buys you.
- Support
- Aceternity sells a private Discord — a room full of other customers, which is a thing a response target cannot be. We publish business-hours targets and answer email, and there is nowhere for buyers to talk to each other.
- An audience
- React Bits and Uiverse run on 56–57% direct traffic — people who type the name. Almost nobody types ours.
Side by side
Entry price is for one individual. The column that actually separates these products is the last one.
| Catalog | Entry | Ships | Free | Figma | Agents | Behind the wall |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hoverlab | $79one-time | 1,126 effects, 307 blocks, 126 pages, 32 templates, 36 tools | All of it — readable, customisable and copyable without an account, plus the REST API, the MCP server and the Figma frame kit | No component library — importable Figma frames for every section and a token file, but no drawn components with variants | Free MCP server, free unauthenticated REST API, CLI | The licence — everything is readable and copyable, you buy the right to ship |
| React BitsRead Head to head | $129one-time | 150 animated components, 280 page blocks in 22 categories, 300 app UI blocks in 38 categories, 15 templates — 765 assets in total | 165+ components in the open-source library, MIT + Commons Clause | No design files | Ships a SKILL.md, plus a 20-item Agent Kit of skills, prompts and recipes at Pro | The source — you can look, you buy the code |
| FlowbiteRead — not reachable sinceHead to head | $149one-time | 330+ blocks, 185 ported to React in beta | The open-source core, plus a free edition of the Figma design system | Ships design files | No dedicated server; the open core is installable anywhere | The source — you can look, you buy the code |
| ShadcnblocksRead Head to head | $149one-time | 2,104+ components, 1,858+ blocks, 20 templates, 49+ pre-built pages, a 484-block Figma kit, a page builder and a VSCode extension | Basic-tier blocks, browsable and copyable behind a login | Ships design files | Searchable through the official shadcn MCP server | The source — you can look, you buy the code |
| Magic UI ProRead Head to head | $199one-time | 50+ sections, 9+ templates | 150+ free and open-source animated components and effects | No design files | Free MIT MCP server — no API key, no account | The source — you can look, you buy the code |
| Aceternity UIRead Head to head | $199one-time | 200+ premium blocks, 12+ templates | Free copy-paste components for React and Next.js; no count published | No design files | Sells "AI-ready prompts" for v0 and Lovable | The source — you can look, you buy the code |
| PrelineRead Head to head | $249one-time | 780+ blocks, 21 premium templates across 207 pages, 100 animated icons, 37 AI-built demos | All 640+ components, 189 blocks, 5 premium templates and the full Figma design system — no account required | Ships design files | MCP free until 1 January 2027, then a subscription | The source — you can look, you buy the code |
| Tailwind PlusRead — not reachable sinceHead to head | $299one-time | 500+ blocks in React, Vue and HTML, 13 templates, Catalyst UI kit | None for Plus; Tailwind CSS itself is separate and free | No design files | None | The source — you can look, you buy the code |
| Untitled UIRead Head to head | $349one-time | 5k+ React components and sections, plus a separate Figma ladder from $129 | 100+ open-source React components, and 2k+ components free in Figma | Ships design files | None | The source — you can look, you buy the code |
| 21st.devRead Head to head | $6/mosubscription | 12,000+ crafted React components, templates and shadcn themes, MCP and CLI | No free plan; 5 Design Bug Bot reviews in the first 7 days | No design files | MCP access is a paid feature — one of only two vendors charging | Agent access — the components are cheap, the MCP server is the subscription |
Figures read from each vendor's own pages on the date beside the name. Where a vendor could not be reached on the last sweep — a login wall, a moved page — the row keeps its older date rather than borrowing a newer one. Follow any name to check it; if one of these is out of date, it is out of date here and we would rather hear about it.
You can find out what changed after you copied it
Copying a component is the easy half. The hard half is a year later, when the bug in it has been fixed here and your copy still has it. Everyone in the table sells the copy.
- Every artifact carries a revisionA content fingerprint per effect, block, page and template, derived from the source rather than from a version somebody remembers to bump.
- It is a public endpoint, with no key/api/v1/revisions returns the whole ledger. Your lockfile never has to tell us which forty things you installed.
- The CLI reads your copy against it`npx hoverlab outdated` lists what has moved since you installed it, with the date it changed; `hoverlab diff <id>` shows the lines.
- Applying it is your call, alwaysNothing reaches into your repo and nothing phones home. The file is yours — this only tells you it is not the newest one.
We have not audited every vendor above for this, so the table has no column for it. What we can say is what we do. The CLI docs show the commands.
What is actually different here
Not the price, and not the agent support. A free MCP server is common now — Magic UI ships one under MIT with no API key, and shadcn's own server ships with every v4 install. Anyone in the table above could match ours in a weekend, and one of them already has.
What is hard to copy is the shape of the whole thing: a ladder that runs effect to block to page to template as one system, 36 designer tools no other catalog bundles, a public API with no key, prices that follow the country you are actually in, and a single wall at the point of commercial use. Every piece of that is cheap to copy on its own. The combination is not, and it is what $79 is buying a licence to.