Every shadcn registry, on the same six criteria

These seven are not one market, which is why a single ranking flatters some of them and buries others. Two of them sell components: shadcnblocks sells whole page sections under a one-off licence, and shadcn.io sells a subscription. Two of them are catalogues of other people's work: 21st.dev and shadcn.io both hold far more than anybody reads. Two of them are lists rather than shops: shadcn's own registry directory is the one the CLI already knows about, and awesome-shadcn/ui is the only entry that publishes its acceptance criteria in full. Shoogle and BlockDex are indexes over all of it, and the difference between them is the unit: Shoogle lists registries, BlockDex lists items inside registries and probes whether each one still resolves. The question that decides your answer is not which is best, it is whether you are buying a component, finding a registry, or finding one component inside 997 registries.

BlockDex is one of the 7 compared and publishes this table. "Not published" means that company does not state the figure on the page cited below. It is not a claim that no such figure exists: this table prints what was read, not what was inferred.

When you should pick one of these instead of BlockDex

BlockDex is not the right answer to every version of this question. Each case below is a real one.

• 21st.dev: You want breadth and you work by pasting a prompt into an agent rather than by running a CLI. It is the largest catalogue of the four at "12,000+ crafted React components, templates, and shadcn themes", it is the only one whose delivery mechanism is the prompt itself — "every component ships as a prompt. One copy - and it builds itself in whatever tool you live in" — and it is the cheapest recurring entry here at $6 a month billed yearly, with unlimited MCP and CLI retrieval on that tier.
• shadcnblocks.com: You want whole page sections rather than components, you want them from one hand, and you would rather pay once than subscribe. It is the only one of the four with a lifetime licence — $149 one-time for 2093+ components and 1678+ blocks — the only one shipping a Figma kit and an admin kit alongside the code, and the only one publishing a maintenance cadence you can hold it to: "50+ new components each month, 100+ new blocks each month", established 2023.
• shadcn/ui registry directory: You want the first-party answer and the shortest possible path from finding a component to having it in your repository. This is the mechanism every other entry here sits on top of, it costs nothing, and the registries in it are "built into the CLI with no additional configuration required" — so `npx shadcn add @<registry>/<component>` works with no account, no key and no config. It is also the only one of the four that tells you plainly what it does not do.
• awesome-shadcn/ui: You want the rules a listing was judged by written down where you can read them, and you want to browse rather than install. It is the only one of the four that publishes its acceptance criteria in full — "this page is the full set of rules a submission is judged by - nothing is checked that isn't written here", five conditions, one resource per pull request — and the only one running an automated link check across its whole list every week. It is also the only one whose free-to-use requirement is a listing criterion rather than a pricing decision.
• shadcn.io: You want one paid licence that covers the whole surface — sections, icons, themes, hooks — and you drive your editor with an agent rather than a CLI. It is by a wide margin the largest registry in this index at 7,847 items crawled, its own pricing page counts "marketing blocks (6,000+)" and "react icons (285k+)" behind a single seat, and it publishes an MCP server so an agent pulls from it without a copy-paste step: "One MCP. Every AI agent. Ship faster." It also has the lowest-commitment way in of the paid entries here, a $0-forever tier you can browse from before deciding.
• Shoogle: You want the answer inside the tool you are already in rather than in a browser tab. Shoogle is the only one here that registers as a shadcn NAMESPACE, so `npx shadcn@latest search @shoogle` searches across community registries from the terminal and the install runs through the official CLI — no site, no copy-paste, and the same route works from any MCP client that speaks streamable HTTP. It is the shortest path from "is there a component for this" to the component being in the project. It also labels itself Alpha, and it publishes no figure for how many items that search covers.

Other shadcn registries and block libraries compared head to head

• Best shadcn registries, ranked on four measured inputs
• Free shadcn blocks, and what free means on each site
• shadcn component libraries
• 21st.dev vs awesome-shadcn/ui
• 21st.dev vs shadcn/ui registry directory
• 21st.dev vs Shoogle
• awesome-shadcn/ui vs Shoogle
• shadcn.io vs Shoogle
• shadcn/ui registry directory vs awesome-shadcn/ui
• shadcn/ui registry directory vs Shoogle
• shadcnblocks.com vs awesome-shadcn/ui
• shadcnblocks.com vs shadcn/ui registry directory
• shadcnblocks.com vs Shoogle

What was checked, and when

Prices and limits move. Every source is printed here so a reader can check it on the day they read this, and a job re-fetches each of these URLs on a schedule and fails when a figure above no longer appears on the page it came from.

• BlockDex, blockdex.thecompound.tech/api-reference: What you get without paying, Cheapest paid option. Read 2026-09-18.
• BlockDex, blockdex.thecompound.tech/: What it publishes, What it says about the code's quality. Read 2026-09-18.
• BlockDex, blockdex.thecompound.tech/method: How you install from it, How something gets listed. Read 2026-09-18.
• 21st.dev, 21st.dev/pricing: What you get without paying, Cheapest paid option, How you install from it, How something gets listed. Read 2026-09-18.
• 21st.dev, 21st.dev/: What it publishes, What it says about the code's quality. Read 2026-09-18.
• shadcnblocks.com, www.shadcnblocks.com/: What you get without paying. Read 2026-09-18.
• shadcnblocks.com, www.shadcnblocks.com/pricing: Cheapest paid option, What it publishes, How you install from it, How something gets listed, What it says about the code's quality. Read 2026-09-18.
• shadcn/ui registry directory, ui.shadcn.com/directory: What you get without paying, Cheapest paid option, What it publishes, How you install from it, How something gets listed, What it says about the code's quality. Read 2026-09-18.
• awesome-shadcn/ui, github.com/birobirobiro/awesome-shadcn-ui: What you get without paying, Cheapest paid option, What it publishes. Read 2026-09-18.
• awesome-shadcn/ui, github.com/birobirobiro/awesome-shadcn-ui/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md: How you install from it, How something gets listed, What it says about the code's quality. Read 2026-09-18.
• shadcn.io, www.shadcn.io/pricing: What you get without paying, Cheapest paid option, What it publishes, What it says about the code's quality. Read 2026-09-18.
• shadcn.io, www.shadcn.io/: How you install from it, How something gets listed. Read 2026-09-18.
• Shoogle, shoogle.dev/mcp: What you get without paying, Cheapest paid option, How you install from it. Read 2026-09-18.
• Shoogle, shoogle.dev/directory: What it publishes, How something gets listed, What it says about the code's quality. Read 2026-09-18.

Every cell above was confirmed against its own source on or since 2026-09-18. /compare