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Material Design VS Angular Material

Compare Material Design VS Angular Material and see what are their differences

Material Design logo Material Design

Google Material Design

Angular Material logo Angular Material

Angular Material is both a UI Component framework and a reference implementation of Google's Material Design Specification.
  • Material Design Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-04-03
  • Angular Material Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-01-24

Material Design features and specs

  • Consistency
    Material Design provides a consistent and coherent visual language across platforms and devices, ensuring a unified user experience.
  • Responsive Design
    The design framework is optimized for a range of devices, enabling interfaces to respond elegantly to different screen sizes and orientations.
  • Comprehensive Guidelines
    Material Design offers detailed guidelines and components, making it easier for developers and designers to create attractive and functional interfaces.
  • Widely Adopted
    Because Material Design is widely used and backed by Google, many developers are familiar with it, facilitating collaboration and integration.
  • User-focused
    Material Design principles are built around user interaction, aiming for intuitive and accessible designs that enhance usability.

Possible disadvantages of Material Design

  • Overuse
    Due to its popularity, apps and websites utilizing Material Design can sometimes appear homogeneous, making it difficult to create distinct brand identities.
  • Complexity
    While comprehensive, the guidelines can be complex and overwhelming for new users, potentially leading to steep learning curves.
  • Performance Issues
    Material Design's reliance on animations and visual effects can sometimes lead to performance issues, particularly on lower-end devices.
  • Constraints
    Strict adherence to guidelines might limit creative freedom, leading to interfaces that feel rigid and lacking in innovation.
  • Resource Intensive
    Implementing Material Design can be resource-intensive, requiring additional development time and effort to fully realize its capabilities.

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.

Material Design videos

YouTube Material Design app review

More videos:

  • Review - Material design
  • Review - Breakdown UI/UX Part I (Google Material Design) | Code Review #3

Angular Material videos

Angular Material Data Table Tutorial

More videos:

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Material Design and Angular Material)
Design Tools
56 56%
44% 44
Developer Tools
31 31%
69% 69
Development Tools
33 33%
67% 67
CSS Framework
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Material Design seems to be a lot more popular than Angular Material. While we know about 16 links to Material Design, 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.

Material Design mentions (16)

  • Release Radar · August 2024: Major updates from the open source community
    If you use React, then you'll want to check out Material UI, a component library for React that implements Google's Material Design system. The latest version adds a new flag to generate CSS variables from serialised theme values. There are also new simpler ways to implement light/dark mode, the introduction of container queries, and new API for applying styles. Check out all the changes and examples in the... - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Building a design system with Radix
    Some examples of popular design systems include Google’s Material Design, the Atlassian Design System, and Carbon Design System by IBM. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • How we built a themeable multi-brand design system with Vue.js
    The main reasons organizations decide to build a design system are myriad and well documented. For the team at Monisnap our top priorities were:. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • ELI5 Why are programs so different between Windows and Mac?
    Why are they consistently different across their products? Companies have brand guidelines to make sure that you have a uniform experience with all of their apps. Here's Google's, for example. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Roboto but Make It Flex
    Compare this to the Human Interface Guidelines which have stayed far more stable and neutral. [1]: https://material.io/design/introduction#theming. - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago
View more

Angular Material mentions (1)

What are some alternatives?

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

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

Vuetify - Material Component Framework for VueJS 2

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

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

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

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