Questions

Question 1

Is shadcnblocks a one-time purchase?

Accepted Answer

Yes. All three tiers are one-time and carry lifetime updates: Pro at $149, Premium at $299 and Elite at $399, each described on the pricing page as "lifetime access" with "lifetime access & updates". The catch is not the term but the seat — every tier reads "single user", so a second developer on the same team is a second purchase. 21st.dev is the opposite arrangement: recurring, from $6 a month billed yearly, with a Team plan priced per seat and centralised billing.

Question 2

How much does 21st.dev cost?

Accepted Answer

$6 a month billed yearly for Builder, which the pricing page describes as "for individuals" and which includes unlimited component installs, unlimited code and prompt copies, and unlimited retrieval via MCP and CLI. Builder + AI is $15 a month on the same terms and adds 500–2,000 monthly AI credits, with more at "+100 for $5 (rolls over)". Team adds centralised billing, shared collections, admin controls and priority support, priced per seat. The page offers a quarterly/yearly toggle marked "save 25%". No free plan is published.

Question 3

Which has more components?

Accepted Answer

21st.dev, by a wide margin, but the two are counting different things. 21st.dev publishes "12,000+ crafted React components, templates, and shadcn themes", broken down on the same page as 2,000+ marketing blocks and 2,100+ UI components. shadcnblocks publishes "2104+ pro components" and "1858+ shadcn blocks", plus 18 templates and 49+ pre-built pages. The useful distinction is not the total: shadcnblocks' flagship unit is a block, a whole page section, where a large share of 21st.dev's catalogue is individual components. Count blocks against blocks and the gap narrows sharply.

Question 4

Do either of them check that a component works?

Accepted Answer

Neither publishes a check. shadcnblocks' claim is that everything is first-party and "hand designed and built", which removes the question rather than answering it — there is no third-party code to review. 21st.dev's is authorship too: "built by real design engineers", under a headline reading "Keep the web free of AI slop". Compare that with what shadcn's own directory says about the registries it lists — "community registries are maintained by third-party developers. Always review code on installation to ensure it meets your security and quality standards" — which is the honest version of the same position. BlockDex asks each registry's item endpoint for the source, which is the same request the install command makes.

Question 5

Do both install with the shadcn CLI?

Accepted Answer

Both can, and they lead with different routes. shadcnblocks leads with the CLI: "all components and blocks available via the official shadcn CLI 'npx shadcn add'", plus the official shadcn MCP and an IDE extension for VS Code and Cursor. 21st.dev leads with the prompt — "Copy the prompt. Paste it anywhere", pasted into Claude Code, Codex or Lovable — and lists "search components via mcp & cli" and "unlimited installs via mcp & cli" on every paid tier. If your workflow is a terminal, both work; if it is an agent, 21st.dev is built for it and shadcnblocks is not.

Question 6

What is a shadcn registry?

Accepted Answer

A site or repository that serves a registry.json manifest the shadcn CLI can install from. shadcn's own documentation puts it plainly: "You can use the shadcn CLI to run your own code registry. Running your own registry allows you to distribute your custom components, hooks, pages, config, rules and other files to any project" — and notes that "the registry works with any project type and any framework, and is not limited to React". Community registries listed in the official directory install as `npx shadcn add @/`, with no extra configuration.

Question 7

Which shadcn registry should I use?

Accepted Answer

Use the official directory first — it is free, it is first-party, and the registries in it need no configuration. Use 21st.dev when the catalogue size matters or when your workflow is an agent rather than a terminal, at $6 a month billed yearly. Use shadcnblocks when you want full page sections, a Figma kit and an admin kit, and you would rather pay $149 once than subscribe — remembering that every tier there reads "single user". Use awesome-shadcn/ui to discover what exists rather than to install: it is a curated list whose entries are links, and its own first rule is that a listed resource has to be genuinely about shadcn/ui rather than merely built with it.

Question 8

Are there free shadcn registries?

Accepted Answer

Most of the field is free, and the two paid ones are the exceptions rather than the rule. shadcn's own directory costs nothing and requires no account. awesome-shadcn/ui is MIT-licensed, and free use is one of its five acceptance rules — "what does not get in is a product that is paid end to end, with no free tier and no public code". shadcnblocks publishes a free tier behind a login: "basic-tier blocks only require a login", against 22,162 free users and 5,420 paying ones. 21st.dev publishes no free plan on its pricing page at all — three tiers, all paid. BlockDex checks free by asking each registry's item endpoint for the source rather than by reading a pricing page.

Question 9

How does anything get listed on these?

Accepted Answer

Two of the four publish a route and two do not. awesome-shadcn/ui publishes the most complete one anywhere in this market: "this page is the full set of rules a submission is judged by - nothing is checked that isn't written here", two ways to submit, one resource per pull request, and five conditions a resource must clear. shadcn's directory has a documented add-a-registry page — "Don't see a registry? Learn how to add it here". 21st.dev publishes no submission route on its pricing or front page, and shadcnblocks publishes none either; what shadcnblocks publishes instead is a first-party production cadence, "50+ new components each month, 100+ new blocks each month", which describes a catalogue written rather than collected.

Question 10

Does anyone check that the components actually work?

Accepted Answer

Not in the sense that matters, and only one of the four says so out loud. shadcn's directory states the limit of its own vouching: "Community registries are maintained by third-party developers. Always review code on installation to ensure it meets your security and quality standards." awesome-shadcn/ui runs the only automated ongoing check in the field — a link check that "runs weekly across the whole list and reports broken links in an issue" — but that checks that a URL resolves, not that code installs. 21st.dev and shadcnblocks both answer the question with authorship rather than with a process. BlockDex re-crawls every registry nightly and asks each item endpoint for the source, which is the same request the install command makes.

Question 11

Where can I get free shadcn blocks?

Accepted Answer

Three places, and they differ in kind rather than in size. shadcn's own registry directory lists community registries that install through the CLI with no account and no configuration — the shortest path from finding a block to having it in your repository. shadcnblocks publishes a free tier of its own catalogue behind a login: "browse free blocks in the library-ready to copy/paste. Basic-tier blocks only require a login." awesome-shadcn/ui is a curated list where being free to use is one of five published acceptance rules, so everything on it clears that bar by construction. This page takes a fourth route: it asks every indexed registry's item endpoint for the source and lists what came back.

Question 12

What does "free" mean on a shadcn registry?

Accepted Answer

Usually that somebody read a pricing page once. That is the reason for the distinction this page turns on: here free means the crawler asked the registry's item endpoint for the block's source and got it, which is the same request the install command makes. A registry can advertise a free tier and still fail that test — a manifest that lists an item whose source is gated, moved or gone is indistinguishable from a working one until you try to install it. Every block listed here was checked that way, on the nightly crawl, not read off a marketing page.

Question 13

Do I need to pay for shadcn/ui itself?

Accepted Answer

No. shadcn/ui is free and so is the registry mechanism the paid catalogues sit on top of: "you can use the shadcn CLI to run your own code registry", and the community registries in the official directory are "built into the CLI with no additional configuration required". What the paid entries sell is a catalogue, not access — shadcnblocks at $149 one-time for 2104+ components and 1858+ blocks, 21st.dev from $6 a month for a 12,000+ item marketplace. You can build entirely on free registries and never touch either.

Question 14

Are free shadcn blocks licensed for commercial use?

Accepted Answer

That is a question about each registry rather than about the category, and it is the one this page cannot answer for you. What can be said from the sources read: awesome-shadcn/ui carries an MIT licence on the list itself and requires listed resources to be free to use, noting that "open source is the norm here" and that several entries are "open-core with an MIT base" — but the licence on a listed project is the project's own. shadcn's directory makes no licence claim about community registries and tells you to check the code yourself: "always review code on installation to ensure it meets your security and quality standards". Paid catalogues state their own terms; shadcnblocks, for example, licenses every tier to a "single user".

Question 15

Can Shoogle be used from the shadcn CLI?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it is the only entry in this comparison that can. Shoogle registers as a shadcn namespace, so `npx shadcn@latest search @shoogle` searches community registries from the terminal — its MCP page describes it as searching "without leaving your terminal", with filters for type, limit and offset. Results come back already addressed to the registry they live in, so the install runs against that registry rather than through Shoogle. The same index is also served as an MCP server over streamable HTTP for Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and Cline. BlockDex has no CLI namespace; it is a website and an open API.

Question 16

Which one covers more registries?

Accepted Answer

They are drawing on different pools. Shoogle's directory publishes "292 registries", and says where they come from: "Community registries pulled from the shadcn/ui directory" — so the inclusion decision is shadcn's. BlockDex assembles its own corpus because, as its method page puts it, "there is no directory of shadcn registries to read" that is complete: seeds, GitHub code search for registry.json from four angles, GitHub topics, and the ecosystem's awesome-list mined for site links as well as repository links. Roughly two thirds of what that finds is rejected before it is published. The current figures are on /api/stats rather than in this table, because the crawl runs nightly and any number printed here would be wrong within a day.

Question 17

Does either one tell you whether a component is free?

Accepted Answer

BlockDex does, per item, and it is the only entry in this comparison that answers it at the item level at all. The crawler fetches "the exact URL npx shadcn@latest add would fetch": source comes back and the item is free, a 401 and it is paid, unreachable and it is unverified — a third answer, never rendered as free. Because that is the same request the install makes, a row marked free is a row whose install has already succeeded once. Shoogle publishes no free-or-paid signal on its directory or its MCP page.

Question 18

Is there an API?

Accepted Answer

BlockDex publishes the whole index as JSON — "No key, no account, CORS open to everyone. Every screen on this site makes exactly one call, and these are the calls." Search, item detail, registry detail, the registry index and the stats row are all readable by anyone, which is what makes the figures on the site checkable rather than assertions. Shoogle's registry endpoint is reachable too, but it is shaped for the CLI rather than for reading the corpus: `/r/registry.json?q=button` answers with pagination `{"hasMore":false,"limit":100,"total":100}` — a top hundred for that query, not a count of what exists.

Question 19

Do either of them vet the code they point at?

Accepted Answer

No, and neither claims to. Shoogle publishes nothing about review, curation or testing of a listing's code, and labels itself Alpha. BlockDex is explicit that it does not: "Crawled, not curated", with "no submissions, no editors and no way to buy a position". What it does check is mechanical — whether the item installs, and whether it still exists, with an item that has vanished from its registry keeping its page and saying so, because that is the page someone arriving from a stale tutorial needs. Both point at somebody else's registry, and both label rather than rank.