Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Angular Material VS jQuery UI

Compare Angular Material VS jQuery UI and see what are their differences

Angular Material logo Angular Material

Angular Material is both a UI Component framework and a reference implementation of Google's Material Design Specification.

jQuery UI logo jQuery UI

Curated set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library
  • Angular Material Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-01-24
  • jQuery UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-17

Angular Material features and specs

  • Consistent Design
    Angular Material provides a set of reusable, well-tested, and accessible UI components based on the Material Design specification, ensuring a consistent look and feel across your application.
  • Pre-built Components
    Offers a wide range of pre-built components including forms, navigation, buttons, and data tables that significantly speed up the development process.
  • Responsiveness
    Components are designed to work smoothly on various screen sizes and resolutions, making it easier to create responsive applications.
  • Integration with Angular
    Tightly integrated with Angular, making it easier to implement and maintain. It also leverages Angular’s features like reactive forms and change detection.
  • Theming and Customization
    Supports extensive theming and customization options, allowing developers to tailor the look and feel of their applications to match brand requirements.
  • Comprehensive Documentation
    Comes with detailed and comprehensive documentation, providing examples and guides to help developers get started quickly.

Possible disadvantages of Angular Material

  • Steep Learning Curve
    Due to the extensive feature set and the intricacies of Material Design, there is a learning curve involved which might be difficult for beginners.
  • Large Bundle Size
    Integrating Angular Material can add to the bundle size of your application, which may affect the loading time and performance, especially for smaller projects.
  • Limited Customizability
    While it offers theming, there are limitations on how much components can be customized compared to creating bespoke solutions.
  • Performance Overhead
    Some components come with additional performance overhead due to their complexity and the use of multiple dependencies.
  • Dependency Management
    You need to manage and maintain additional dependencies that come with Angular Material, which can complicate the build process and dependency management.
  • Opinionated Design
    Being based on Google’s Material Design, it might impose design choices that might not align with every project's design requirements.

jQuery UI features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    jQuery UI simplifies creating and managing complex UI components with straightforward syntax and comprehensive documentation.
  • Compatibility
    jQuery UI is highly compatible with older browsers, offering a broader range of support compared to more modern frameworks.
  • Extensibility
    jQuery UI is designed to be modular and extendable, allowing developers to use only the components they need and easily extend or theming them.
  • Rich Set of Widgets
    It comes with a variety of pre-built widgets such as datepickers, accordions, and sliders, which can save development time.
  • Animated Effects
    jQuery UI includes many built-in animation effects that can enhance the user experience without requiring additional libraries.
  • Theming
    The library provides Themeroller, a tool that allows developers to create custom themes easily, ensuring UI consistency and branding.

Possible disadvantages of jQuery UI

  • Performance
    Due to its extensive feature set, jQuery UI can be relatively heavy, which may affect performance, particularly in resource-constrained environments.
  • Not Mobile-First
    jQuery UI is not designed with mobile-first principles in mind, making it less optimal for modern responsive web applications.
  • Learning Curve
    While easy to use for simple tasks, mastering jQuery UI for more complex applications may require a significant learning curve.
  • Dependency on jQuery
    Since jQuery UI relies on the jQuery library, it adds an additional dependency which can be limiting if you prefer or are required to use vanilla JS or another library.
  • Declining Popularity
    With the rise of modern frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular, jQuery UI has seen a decline in popularity and community support.
  • Limited Modern Features
    Compared to contemporary UI libraries, jQuery UI lacks some of the modern features and performance optimizations found in newer libraries.

Angular Material videos

Angular Material Data Table Tutorial

More videos:

  • Review - Angular Material’s Trees - Tina Gao
  • Review - Angular Material in practice – Thomas Burleson

jQuery UI videos

jQuery UI tutorial: Adding a user interface with jQuery UI | lynda.com

More videos:

  • Review - jQuery UI Ultimate:Design Amazing Interfaces Using jQuery UI : Understanding the curriculum.

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Angular Material and jQuery UI)
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Javascript UI Libraries
0 0%
100% 100
Development Tools
20 20%
80% 80
Design Tools
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, jQuery UI seems to be a lot more popular than Angular Material. While we know about 15 links to jQuery UI, we've tracked only 1 mention of Angular Material. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Angular Material mentions (1)

jQuery UI mentions (15)

  • Let Me Talk About Component-based Front-end Development
    The once popular jQuery, with its strengths fully utilized in jQuery UI and Bootstrap, provides many UI components and is also friendly to backend developers, seemingly meeting the requirements. However, looking at their component implementation and resource loading forms—. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • 100+ Must-Have Web Development Resources
    jQuery UI: An open-source library for building user interfaces based on jQuery. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • What is a component library and should you build your own?
    Fortunately, when I started web development in earnest, many of these issues were ironed out. By this point, there were still a handful of libraries that made writing complex interfaces with cross-browser support a little easier. Jquery UI, the first component library I used, supported accordions and other widgets. But the browser is constantly evolving, and we now have a native way of implementing this accordion... - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Best ReactJS library for Drag-n-Drop Table for plugin Admin view?
    Because WordPress is already have these jQuery & jQuery UI libraries (https://jqueryui.com/). Source: almost 2 years ago
  • jQuery 3.6.2 Released
    We still use jQuery + jQuery UI on our website because it is basically battle tested through 15+ years. https://jqueryui.com/ It is easy as hell. What's there to not like? I don't care to be called names or being old fashioned. I also don't care about "right" tooling for frontend. As far it works and it is robust and it is going to be around for many years, I am fine with it. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Angular Material and jQuery UI, you can also consider the following products

Vuetify - Material Component Framework for VueJS 2

jQuery - The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library.

Buefy - Lightweight UI components for Vue.js based on Bulma

React Native - A framework for building native apps with React

Vuesax - Vuesax is a library of Vuejs components that facilitates front-end development and streamlines work...

Babel - Babel is a compiler for writing next generation JavaScript.