Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Material Design Lite VS Flat UI

Compare Material Design Lite VS Flat UI and see what are their differences

Material Design Lite logo Material Design Lite

Material Design Lite Components in HTML/CSS/JS

Flat UI logo Flat UI

Free Bootstrap Framework and Theme
  • Material Design Lite Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30
  • Flat UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-08-24

Material Design Lite features and specs

  • Lightweight
    Material Design Lite (MDL) is a lightweight CSS and JavaScript framework that doesn't rely on any external dependencies, making it easy to integrate into projects while ensuring faster load times and better performance.
  • Google's Material Design Aesthetics
    MDL provides components and styles consistent with Google's Material Design guidelines, allowing developers to create visually appealing and modern user interfaces.
  • Easy to Use
    MDL uses straightforward HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, enabling developers, even those with minimal experience, to quickly build and design web applications.
  • Responsive Design
    Material Design Lite is built with mobile-first, responsive design principles, ensuring applications look good on both mobile and desktop devices.
  • Component Rich
    MDL offers a variety of ready-to-use UI components such as buttons, cards, menus, sliders, and more, which can speed up development time.

Possible disadvantages of Material Design Lite

  • Limited Customization
    While MDL offers a set of predefined styles for consistency, it can be challenging to customize beyond the provided options without delving deeply into the CSS.
  • No Longer Actively Maintained
    MDL is no longer actively maintained by Google, meaning there are no updates or improvements, potentially affecting compatibility with modern browsers and devices over time.
  • Basic Components Compared to Other Frameworks
    Compared to comprehensive frameworks like Angular Material or Bootstrap, MDL offers a relatively basic set of UI components, which might not satisfy all project needs.
  • Learning Curve for Advanced Use
    While basic uses of MDL are simple, more advanced implementations might require a deeper understanding of the framework, which can impose a steep learning curve for new developers.
  • Potential Performance Overhead
    MDL's JavaScript components can add unnecessary overhead if not managed carefully, especially in complex applications where performance is critical.

Flat UI features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Material Design Lite videos

What is Material Design Lite?

More videos:

  • Review - Intro to using Material Design Lite
  • Review - Material Design Lite: All About Android 221

Flat UI videos

No Flat UI videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Material Design Lite and Flat UI)
CSS Framework
79 79%
21% 21
Design Tools
80 80%
20% 20
Developer Tools
83 83%
17% 17
Development Tools
76 76%
24% 24

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Material Design Lite seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 4 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 Lite mentions (4)

  • Where can i find premade components like Navbars, Headers, Cards, Footers, etc.
    Https://getmdl.io/ No specific framework (e.g React, Angular) required. Source: over 2 years ago
  • The React roadmap for beginners you never knew you needed.
    Materialize, Material UI, Material Design Lite. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • How do i use material design in an html page ?
    I would recommend looking into an alternative such as https://getmdl.io/. Source: over 3 years ago
  • For some reason, button is not misaligned in CodePen but when the exact same code is in a normal HTML file, its misaligned and it looks weird
    Sorry if I'm not providing much context, but I'm using Material Design Lite (https://getmdl.io). Strangely, it doesn't work in other online HTML "compilers" like W3Schools TryIt. Source: about 4 years ago

Flat UI mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Flat UI yet. Tracking of Flat UI recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Material Design Lite and Flat UI, you can also consider the following products

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

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

UIKit - A lightweight and modular front-end framework for developing fast and powerful web interfaces

Material Design - Google Material Design

Foundation - The most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world

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.