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Angular Material VS Stylus

Compare Angular Material VS Stylus 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.

Stylus logo Stylus

EXPRESSIVE, DYNAMIC, ROBUST CSS
  • Angular Material Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-01-24
  • Stylus Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-20

Stylus is a revolutionary new language, providing an efficient, dynamic, and expressive way to generate CSS. Supporting both an indented syntax and regular CSS style.

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.

Stylus features and specs

  • Simplified Syntax
    Stylus provides an optional semicolon-free and curly-brace-free syntax, making the code cleaner and easier to write.
  • Extensive Feature Set
    Stylus offers a wide range of features like mixins, nesting, variables, functions, and built-in functions, which increase its flexibility and power.
  • Preprocessor Enhancements
    Stylus includes advanced features that are not available in CSS alone, such as mathematical operations, conditionals, and loops, which can make stylesheets more dynamic and maintainable.
  • JavaScript Interoperability
    Stylus allows embedding of JavaScript expressions and logic directly within the stylesheets, providing developers with additional functionality and control.

Possible disadvantages of Stylus

  • Learning Curve
    The flexibility and multitude of features in Stylus can introduce complexity, making it harder for beginners to grasp quickly compared to more straightforward CSS preprocessors.
  • Less Popularity
    Stylus is less popular than other preprocessors like Sass or LESS, which might result in fewer learning resources, community support, and third-party tools.
  • Potential for Overuse
    The advanced features could lead developers to overuse them, resulting in overly complex code that is difficult to maintain and understand.
  • Build Tool Dependencies
    Integration of Stylus into a project generally requires additional build tools and configurations, which can add to the setup and maintenance overhead.

Angular Material videos

Angular Material Data Table Tutorial

More videos:

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

Stylus videos

Best stylus for iPhone! Don't waste your money!

More videos:

  • Review - What is the best iPad stylus?
  • Review - Review: MEKO 2-in-1 Stylus (2nd Gen)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Angular Material and Stylus)
Developer Tools
46 46%
54% 54
Development Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Browser Extension
0 0%
100% 100
Design Tools
50 50%
50% 50

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Angular Material and Stylus

Angular Material Reviews

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Stylus Reviews

112 Best Chrome Extensions You Should Try (2021 List)
Stylus offers functionality to install and write themes. It is an open-source community-driven extension that makes it much better than its counterparts. Using Stylus, you can install themes from popular repositories, backup your installed styles, and much more. Watch the above video to learn more about Stylus.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Stylus seems to be a lot more popular than Angular Material. While we know about 14 links to Stylus, 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)

Stylus mentions (14)

  • 100+ Must-Have Web Development Resources
    Stylus: Provides a more efficient and elegant way to generate CSS. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • 33 front-end development tools developers use in 2024
    Sass, Less and Stylus, extends CSS by adding variables, nesting mixins, and other features. It's an excellent solution for organizing huge and complex stylesheets. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • BEM Modifiers in Pure CSS Nesting
    I hate preprocessors. Be it SASS, SCSS, LESS, Stylus, or any other. Really, without any exceptions. Though, I think my hatred for preprocessors is not because of the technology itself, but because of how other people use them. Throughout my development career, I have often encountered tickets where a seemingly simple task, like changing the text size, which should take minutes, ended up taking me hours. This is... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Future of CSS: Functions and Mixins
    Traditionally CSS lacked features such as variables, nesting, mixins, and functions. This was frustrating for Developers as it often led to CSS quickly becoming complex and cumbersome. In an attempt to make code easier and less repetitive CSS pre-processors were born. You would write CSS in the format the pre-processor understood and, at build time, you'd have some nice CSS. The most common pre-processors these... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Quick Guide To CSS Preprocessors
    The Stylus is built on Node.js. It differs from Sass and Less, which are more opinionated to the syntax; the stylus allows you to omit semicolons, colons, and braces if you want at any time. Another cool feature is that the stylus has a property lookup feature. You can do that easily if you set property X relative to property Y's value. The stylus can be more concise because of its flexibility, but it depends on... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

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

Vuetify - Material Component Framework for VueJS 2

Sass - Syntatically Awesome Style Sheets

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

Dark Reader - Reduce eye strain in your browser with this extension that provides a dark theme for browsing.

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

PostCSS - Increase code readability. Add vendor prefixes to CSS rules using values from Can I Use. Autoprefixer will use the data based on current browser popularity and property support to apply prefixes for you.