Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Bootstrap VS Material Components

Compare Bootstrap VS Material Components and see what are their differences

Bootstrap logo Bootstrap

Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and JS for popular UI components and interactions

Material Components logo Material Components

Modular and customizable UI components from Google
  • Bootstrap Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-22
  • Material Components Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-12-18

Bootstrap features and specs

  • Responsive Design
    Bootstrap's grid system ensures that webpages are responsive and adapt to different screen sizes seamlessly.
  • Pre-designed Components
    Bootstrap comes with a variety of pre-designed components like buttons, forms, modals, and navigation bars that streamline the development process.
  • Cross-browser Compatibility
    Bootstrap ensures that your website will function correctly across different browsers, reducing the time spent on debugging issues related to browser inconsistencies.
  • Extensive Documentation
    The documentation is comprehensive and well-organized, making it easier for developers to understand and implement Bootstrap features quickly.
  • Community Support
    With a large and active community, finding help and resources related to Bootstrap development is relatively easy.
  • Customizable
    Bootstrap allows you to customize the default styles and components using Sass variables, making it adaptable to any project needs.
  • CDN Support
    Bootstrap can be included via Content Delivery Networks (CDN), which can help to speed up the initial load time of your web pages.

Possible disadvantages of Bootstrap

  • Uniform Look
    Websites built with Bootstrap often look similar because many developers use the default styles and components without customization.
  • Overhead
    Including the entire Bootstrap library can add unnecessary weight to your project if you only use a small fraction of its features.
  • Learning Curve
    For beginners, the extensive set of features and classes can be overwhelming and take some time to learn.
  • Dependency on jQuery
    Older versions of Bootstrap heavily rely on jQuery, which can be a disadvantage for projects that aim to minimize dependencies.
  • Specific Structure
    Bootstrap works best when you adhere to its predefined structure and classes, which can limit flexibility for more complex or unique designs.
  • Customization Challenges
    Deep customization can be difficult and time-consuming, especially if you need to override many default styles and behaviors.
  • Performance Issues
    Using a large number of Bootstrap components can lead to performance issues, particularly on lower-end devices.

Material Components features and specs

  • Design Consistency
    Material Components follow the Material Design guidelines, ensuring a consistent look and feel across various platforms and devices. This helps maintain a unified user experience.
  • Rich Component Library
    The library offers a wide range of pre-designed components that can be easily integrated into projects, saving development time and effort.
  • Accessibility-Focused
    Material Components prioritize accessibility, providing built-in support for screen readers, high contrast, and other features to make applications usable by people with disabilities.
  • Responsive Design
    Components are designed to be responsive, adapting seamlessly to different screen sizes and orientations, which is essential in today's multi-device ecosystem.
  • Community and Support
    Being widely used, there is a large community and extensive documentation available for developers to get help and support when implementing components.

Possible disadvantages of Material Components

  • Customization Limitations
    While Material Components are highly customizable, they might not meet unique branding requirements out-of-the-box, requiring additional effort for further customization.
  • Performance Overhead
    Including a rich set of components can introduce performance overhead, especially in applications where weight is a concern, potentially affecting load times.
  • Learning Curve
    Developers unfamiliar with Material Design may need to invest time in understanding its principles and guidelines to effectively use the components.
  • Frequent Updates
    Material Design principles and components are frequently updated, which might require developers to regularly update their code to maintain compatibility.

Bootstrap videos

Is Bootstrap Still Worth It? -- 1 Design, 2 Code Bases.

More videos:

  • Review - BOOTSTRAP Review | Best CSS Library ?
  • Review - Should you use Bootstrap?

Material Components videos

No Material Components videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Bootstrap and Material Components)
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Design Tools
97 97%
3% 3
Web Icons
0 0%
100% 100
CSS Framework
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

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

Bootstrap Reviews

22 Best Bootstrap Alternatives & What Each Is Best For
Bootstrap alternatives are a suite of different tools and frameworks that web developers and designers employ for creating dynamic, responsive websites and applications. These tools, like Bootstrap itself, offer pre-written code for different elements of a website - from typography and buttons to navigation bars and image carousels - but each has its unique features and...
Source: thectoclub.com
15 Top Bootstrap Alternatives For Frontend Developers in 2024
UIKit is a modular front-end framework like Bootstrap and a Bootstrap competitor designed to develop fast and powerful web interfaces. You can utilize it with HTML or JavaScript based on your preference. It offers built-in support for right-to-left languages and includes an extensive library of components. This framework like Bootstrap provides a convenient solution for...
Source: coursesity.com
9 Best Bootstrap Alternatives | Best Frontend Frameworks [2024]
The only downside it has as compared to Bootstrap and Foundation is it is only a CSS framework, which means no JavaScript. So you will have to write your own JavaScript or Jquery to toggle your dropdowns or perform other basic interactionhttps://bulma.io/s of the sort. Overall it is a great alternative to Bootstrap, which is also being updated very frequently.
Source: hackr.io
Top 10 Best CSS Frameworks for Front-End Developers in 2022
Bootstrap is one of the most popular CSS frameworks globally and received instant popularity because of its responsive design. It was also the first framework that gave priority to mobile devices. With Bootstrap, there is no need for a separate design for mobile viewing. You just need to add the necessary classes, and the website will adapt to the screen size based on the...
Source: hackr.io
15 Best CSS Frameworks: Professional Bootstrap and Foundation Alternatives
This is why Bootstrap is by far the most popular framework on the market. All developers have heard of Bootstrap, and more than 80% of them say they are happy using it.

Material Components Reviews

We have no reviews of Material Components yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Bootstrap seems to be a lot more popular than Material Components. While we know about 362 links to Bootstrap, we've tracked only 16 mentions of Material Components. 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.

Bootstrap mentions (362)

  • How to Build a Blog with Laravel (& Send Slack Notifications)
    This will show the posts passed from the controller in a row of cards. Please notice that you are linking to Bootstrap’s CDN for easy styling. If there are no posts, a message on a card saying that there are no posts will be shown. - Source: dev.to / 12 days ago
  • Overengineered Anchor Links
    Yeah, good point. It's kinda common to have a big footer. Examples: https://getbootstrap.com/, https://stake.us/ (casino) That way on desktop you could get away with a 50vh margin under the content and then another 50vh for the footer. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • The 3 Best Python Frameworks To Build UIs for AI Apps
    FastHTML allows developers to build modern web applications entirely in Python without touching JavaScript or React. As its name implies, it is quicker to begin with FastHTML. However, it does not have pre-built UI components and styling. Getting the best out of this framework requires the knowledge of HTMX and UI styling using CSS libraries like Tailwind and Bootstrap. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Tailwind CSS vs. Bootstrap: Which Framework is Better for Your Project?
    Bootstrap is one of the oldest and most established CSS frameworks, originally developed by Twitter in 2011. It takes a component-based approach to web development, providing a comprehensive collection of ready-to-use UI elements and prebuilt components. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • How I Vibe-Coded an App to Explore GitHub Topics and Trending Repositories
    For the frontend, I had no prior experience, so I relied entirely on Claude's capabilities. 🙏 Claude generated the entire frontend in pure JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, and even added Bootstrap to it. This not only saved me a significant amount of time but also made my application responsive and visually appealing. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
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Material Components mentions (16)

  • The Decline of Usability
    Yeah, companies would get entire studies done to determine what sort of UI should be used, for what reasons, etc. A few years ago I was working at a company where they still use software that originated in the 90s. This is in an industrial setting where all sorts of information is displayed to operators on clusters of screens. What amazed me the most is when I came across a binder which contained the 5th revision... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • What is this 'drawer like' card-view type of widget called? Can someone help me with how to implement such a widget?
    Https://m3.material.io/components here, you’ll need this. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • How would you name this?
    My default approach is to search for similar comonents in a framework like https://material.io/components. Sometimes I check if the designer has already named it in Figma. Or, if I know another interface/website with that element, I'll see if it has a class name :). - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Component Naming
    As everybody’s saying, these are kinda the same component, but for naming types of components within a design system you can’t really go wrong with https://material.io/components. Source: over 2 years ago
  • A Quick Start into Material UI
    A popular UI library that allows developers to reuse well-designed components from Material Design, a best-practice design system for front-end development. MUI plays well with React, and provides interactive components for designing responsive user interfaces. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Bootstrap and Material Components, you can also consider the following products

Tailwind CSS - A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.

Material Icons - Google Fonts now supports icons

Materialize CSS - A modern responsive front-end framework based on Material Design

Iconhub - Custom and own beautiful icons in no time

Bulma - Bulma is an open source CSS framework based on Flexbox and built with Sass. It's 100% responsive, fully modular, and available for free.

Material Design Kit - Design for Android better and faster