Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Material Design for Bootstrap 4 VS FlowBite

Compare Material Design for Bootstrap 4 VS FlowBite and see what are their differences

Material Design for Bootstrap 4 logo Material Design for Bootstrap 4

Powerful and free UI KIT for the newest Bootstrap 4 and Material Design

FlowBite logo FlowBite

Build UI interfaces and simplify the process of integrating into live websites with Tailwind CSS
  • Material Design for Bootstrap 4 Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-21
  • FlowBite Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-14

Material Design for Bootstrap 4 features and specs

  • Consistency
    Material Design for Bootstrap (MDBootstrap) combines Google's Material Design principles with Bootstrap 4’s robust framework, ensuring a cohesive and modern design across different components.
  • Rich Component Library
    MDBootstrap offers a wide range of pre-built components such as cards, buttons, navigation elements, and forms, which can speed up development substantially.
  • Responsive Design
    Being built on Bootstrap 4, MDBootstrap is highly responsive out of the box, ensuring that websites look good on both desktop and mobile devices.
  • Customization
    Extensive customization options are available, allowing developers to adjust the design to fit specific needs while maintaining Material Design guidelines.
  • Comprehensive Documentation
    MDBootstrap provides thorough and detailed documentation, including examples, tutorials, and explanations, which can help developers quickly learn and implement the framework.
  • Community and Support
    MDBootstrap has a strong community and offers premium support options, which can be very beneficial for resolving issues and getting advice.

Possible disadvantages of Material Design for Bootstrap 4

  • Learning Curve
    Although MDBootstrap is well-documented, the combination of Material Design principles with Bootstrap might introduce additional concepts for new developers to learn.
  • File Size
    Incorporating both MDBootstrap and Bootstrap may increase the total file size, potentially affecting page load times and performance.
  • Dependency on jQuery
    MDBootstrap relies on jQuery, which could be a downside for projects aiming to minimize dependencies or for developers preferring vanilla JavaScript or other frameworks.
  • Cost for Advanced Features
    While a significant portion of MDBootstrap's features are free, some advanced components and plugins are locked behind a paid subscription, which might be a drawback for developers or companies on a tight budget.
  • Potential Overhead
    Using a framework with extensive features may introduce overhead, particularly if only a small subset of those features are needed for a specific project.
  • Fragmentation Risk
    As MDBootstrap gets updates, keeping up with changes in both Bootstrap 4 and Material Design guidelines might introduce additional maintenance overhead and potential fragmentation.

FlowBite features and specs

  • Design Consistency
    FlowBite offers a standardized design system that ensures a consistent look and feel across all components and pages. This helps in maintaining uniformity in design, which is particularly useful for large projects.
  • Component Library
    It comes with a rich library of pre-built components such as buttons, modals, and navigation bars. This speeds up the development process as you don't have to build these from scratch.
  • Customization
    FlowBite allows for a high level of customization, enabling developers to tweak components and styles to fit their specific project requirements.
  • Integration with Tailwind CSS
    FlowBite integrates seamlessly with Tailwind CSS, a popular utility-first CSS framework. This allows developers to take advantage of Tailwind's powerful styling capabilities.
  • Documentation
    The platform provides thorough and easy-to-understand documentation, which helps in quickly getting up to speed with using FlowBite components and utilities.

Possible disadvantages of FlowBite

  • Learning Curve
    There can be a steep learning curve for developers unfamiliar with Tailwind CSS or component-based design systems, requiring time to become proficient.
  • Dependency on Tailwind CSS
    The reliance on Tailwind CSS means that developers need to be familiar with this CSS framework. If you are not already using Tailwind CSS, adopting FlowBite may require significant changes to your existing setup.
  • Performance Overhead
    Including a large number of pre-built components and utilities can add to the performance overhead, making the web pages larger and potentially slower to load.
  • Limited Design Choices
    While FlowBite offers a range of components, the design styles are somewhat predefined. This might limit creativity and make it difficult to implement highly unique designs without extensive customization.
  • Community and Support
    Although growing, FlowBite's community and support resources are not as extensive as other more established design systems and frameworks. This can make it harder to find help or third-party plugins.

Analysis of Material Design for Bootstrap 4

Overall verdict

  • MDBootstrap is generally considered a good tool for web development, particularly if you are aiming to implement Material Design principles in your projects. It effectively integrates the modern, sleek design language of Material Design with the robust framework of Bootstrap, offering a versatile toolkit for building responsive, aesthetically pleasing web applications.

Why this product is good

  • Material Design for Bootstrap 4 (MDBootstrap) is a popular choice for developers because it combines the aesthetic appeal of Material Design with the flexibility and responsiveness of Bootstrap. It provides a wide range of components, templates, and features that help streamline the web development process. MDBootstrap is also known for its ease of use, detailed documentation, and community support, making it accessible for both beginners and experienced developers.

Recommended for

    MDBootstrap is recommended for developers looking to create responsive websites or web applications that utilize Google's Material Design principles. It is particularly beneficial for those already familiar with Bootstrap and seeking to expand their design capabilities without a steep learning curve. It is also suitable for projects that require rapid prototyping, as it provides a wide array of pre-designed components and templates.

Analysis of FlowBite

Overall verdict

  • FlowBite is a valuable tool for developers who are looking to speed up their development process with quality UI components. Its integration with Tailwind CSS makes it a suitable choice for those already familiar with or using the Tailwind framework.

Why this product is good

  • FlowBite is considered good because it offers a collection of pre-designed UI components built with Tailwind CSS, making it easier for developers to build websites and applications quickly. The components are responsive, customizable, and maintain design consistency across projects. Furthermore, FlowBite provides comprehensive documentation and community support, which can help developers integrate it easily with their projects.

Recommended for

  • Web developers looking for ready-to-use UI components.
  • Teams using Tailwind CSS who want to enhance their development with a consistent design system.
  • Projects requiring fast prototyping with responsive and aesthetically pleasing design elements.
  • Developers who prefer extensive customization options for their UI components.

Material Design for Bootstrap 4 videos

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FlowBite videos

The ULTIMATE Figma UI Kit (Flowbite)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Material Design for Bootstrap 4 and FlowBite)
Design Tools
41 41%
59% 59
Developer Tools
28 28%
72% 72
Web App
30 30%
70% 70
Website Builder
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 Material Design for Bootstrap 4 and FlowBite

Material Design for Bootstrap 4 Reviews

We have no reviews of Material Design for Bootstrap 4 yet.
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FlowBite Reviews

Tailwind CSS: 15 Component Libraries & UI Kits
Flowbite has over 450 components; the documentation has component code for HTML with options to install as a library for the most popular frameworks. The project has over 2,800 stars on GitHub and gets around 50,000 weekly downloads on npm.
Source: stackdiary.com
22 Best Sites for Free Tailwind Components
In addition to hundreds of developed pages and Tailwind components, such as application UI, marketing UI, and e-commerce layouts, Flowbite’s pro edition includes a Figma design system based on Tailwind CSS utility classes.
How to Choose a Tailwind Component Library (Plus the Top 6 Options)
The last component library in our list and our second paid one is Flowbite. It has over 450 components across various types of designs and applications much like some of our previous libraries. But, an interesting thing about this library is you can also get the Figma files for the components so your designer and developers can be perfectly in sync with each other, further...
Source: prismic.io

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Material Design for Bootstrap 4 seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 11 times since March 2021. 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.

Material Design for Bootstrap 4 mentions (11)

  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    MDBootstrap - Free for personal & commercial use Bootstrap, Angular, React, and Vue UI Kits with over 700 components, stunning templates, 1-min installation, extensive tutorials & colossal community. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • What do you use for quick UI?
    I used this a while back, if you're into material design it's pretty solid https://mdbootstrap.com/. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Building Composable Commerce with Nuxt, Shopify, and Storyblok Crash Course Part Two
    By default, the IPX image optimizer that the image module is using, needs to have a list of domains that can be used for optimizing the images. For now, what would happen is that our Banner would be displayed, but it wont be optimized. In order to enable the optimization, we need to add the [mdbootstrap.com](http://mdbootstrap.com) to the allowed domains for IPX. Let’s do this below:. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • [FOR HIRE] Django Web Application Developer, CICD Development, and Any Kind of Automation
    Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, AJAX, Bootstrap; I use Django's Jinja2-based templating system. I also have a commercial license for https://mdbootstrap.com/, if you want to build out and customize your own pages with a sleek material design. I'm open to substituting any of the major front-end frameworks in lieu of this vanilla approach. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Top 10 Backend Frameworks in 2022
    Express, or Express.js, is a Node.js based web framework written in JavaScript. It is the standard web framework for Node.js. Express is popularly used in JavaScript development stacks like MEAN, MERN and MEVN along with MongoDB and JavaScript frontend frameworks. Some popular websites using Express are Unsplash, MDBootstrap, Paypal, Coursera, Atlassian, Shopee and Docker Hub. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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FlowBite mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of FlowBite yet. Tracking of FlowBite recommendations started around Sep 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Material Design for Bootstrap 4 and FlowBite, you can also consider the following products

Material UI - A CSS Framework and a Set of React Components that Implement Google's Material Design

DaisyUI - Free UI components plugin for Tailwind CSS

Craftwork - A collection of User Interface resources made by Craftwork

Tailwind UI - Beautiful UI components by the creators of Tailwind CSS.

Element UI - A Desktop UI Library. Element, a Vue 2.0 based component library for developers, designers and product managers.

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