shadcn/ui hands you neutral component primitives you own. UIcockpit hands you the design language that sits on top — so your app does not look like every other shadcn build. They are complementary, not rivals.
shadcn/ui is a brilliant collection of accessible React components you copy into your repo and own outright. What it deliberately does not give you is an opinion: out of the box, every shadcn app shares the same neutral grey look.
UIcockpit is the layer above. You make a handful of visual decisions — colour, type, shape, density, motion — and it derives a coherent set of framework-neutral design tokens. It even exports a drop-in shadcn globals.css, so the two work together: keep your shadcn components, wear your own brand.
Where each one is the right tool — honestly.
We do not replace shadcn — we theme it. UIcockpit exports a shadcn globals.css so you can restyle an existing shadcn project without touching a single component.
The output is plain CSS custom properties (--k-*). They drop into React, Vue, Svelte, plain HTML — anything. You are never tied to one framework to wear your own brand.
Tokens (CSS + JSON), a Tailwind @theme block, a shadcn globals.css, an AI prompt and a machine-readable contract — all derive from one config, so they can never disagree. Plus a hosted live <link> you return to, and a CLI + MCP so your agent reads the system and checks its own work against it.
100% free, framework-neutral tokens — no account, no lock-in, your design language, your file.