duck/ui vs Aceternity UI
The boldest visual effects on the shelf — 3D cards, spotlights, glowing beams, magnetic buttons, particle backgrounds — aimed at landing pages that need to look expensive.
Short answer
Aceternity UI goes further than duck/ui on spectacle and duck/ui goes further on consistency. Aceternity is built for a hero section that has to stop someone scrolling; duck/ui is built so a whole application — hero, dashboard, settings page — reads as one system. If you need one showstopping section, Aceternity. If you need forty screens that match, duck/ui.
Aceternity UI is best described as: visual-effects component collection. Compared against its publicly documented positioning as of 2026-07-31.
What Aceternity UI does well
Stated first, because a comparison that skips this is not worth reading.
- Effects nothing else on this list attempts: 3D cards, spotlight and particle work.
- Excellent for a launch page or portfolio where impact matters more than restraint.
- Copy-paste, so you own and can gut any effect you take.
- A visual bar that pushed the whole ecosystem forward.
Where they differ
| Aceternity UI | duck/ui | |
|---|---|---|
| Design intent | Maximum impact per section | One system across every screen |
| Where it fits | Landing pages, portfolios, launch moments | Product surfaces as well as landing pages |
| Restraint | Yours to impose | Built in — holo is rationed to one element per viewport |
| Theme contract | Per-component styling | Full shadcn variable contract plus duck extras |
| Tuning | Edit the component | Editor at duckui.davideghiotto.it/create; export CSS or share a preset link |
Which to pick
Pick Aceternity UI
Pick Aceternity UI when a single section carries the whole page and you want the effect that makes people screenshot it.
Visit Aceternity UIPick duck/ui
Pick duck/ui when the same look has to survive across a dashboard, a settings page and an empty state — where a spotlight effect on every screen becomes noise.
Read the install guideUsing both
Reach for an Aceternity effect as the one holo-grade moment on a duck/ui page, and drop the duck holo element from that viewport. Two competing focal points cancel each other out, which is the whole reason duck/ui rations them.
FAQ
Is duck/ui as visually bold as Aceternity UI?
Not at the level of a single section, and deliberately so. duck/ui rations its strongest finish — the holographic foil — to one element per viewport, because the system is meant to hold up across a whole application rather than one hero.
Can I put an Aceternity component in a duck/ui project?
Yes. Both are copy-paste through the shadcn CLI. Repoint the component's colours at semantic tokens such as bg-primary and border-border so it follows the theme, and treat it as that viewport's single focal effect.