Software Alternatives & Reviews

Material UI VS Balsamiq

Compare Material UI VS Balsamiq and see what are their differences

Material UI logo Material UI

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

Balsamiq logo Balsamiq

Balsamiq. Rapid, effective and fun wireframing software.
  • Material UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-24
  • Balsamiq Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-02

Material UI videos

Getting Started With Material-UI For React (Material Design for React)

More videos:

  • Review - Code Review: react-material-ui-datatable

Balsamiq videos

UX Review: Balsamiq.com - Watch a Usability Expert Review Our Site!

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Balsamiq Mockups: Beginner Tutorial
  • Review - Balsamiq Wireframes for Desktop Overview (Windows)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Material UI and Balsamiq)
Design Tools
52 52%
48% 48
Prototyping
0 0%
100% 100
Development Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
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 UI and Balsamiq

Material UI Reviews

React UI Components Libraries: Our Top Picks for 2023
Material-UI (MUI) is a fully loaded UI component library that offers a comprehensive set of UI tools to create and deploy new features at speed. It is one of the most powerful and popular UI component libraries out there with over 3.2 million downloads on npm a week, 78k stars on GitHub, 17k+ followers on Twitter, and 2.4k+ open-source contributors.
Source: kinsta.com
Top React component libraries (2021 edition)
For support, there’s plenty of free options like the Material-UI community, Stack Overflow, and GitHub. Material points technical questions to Stack Overflow, where more than 12.5k questions have been posted. GitHub is used exclusively as a bugs and feature requests tracker. On the paid side, Material-UI suggests purchasing a Tidelift subscription which offers “flexibility...
Source: retool.com
Comparing popular React component libraries
Unlike Ant Design, Material-UI offers built-in methods to style components. makeStyles() is useful, especially when your code starts to get big; it helps you find the element to style more quickly and makes the code more readable. The downside is that readability may degrade as a component grows. But overall, Material-UI is a strong, highly customizable library.
6 Best ReactJS based UI Frameworks
MaterialUI is a set of React Components that Implement the Google’s Material Design Guidelines. When it comes to predefined components especially UI, one important thing we need to find is how many UI widgets are available and whether these can be customized with configurations. Material-UI has all components that you need and it is very configurable with predefined color...
Source: medium.com
20 Best Front-End Frameworks For Bootstrap Alternative
Material UI is another framework that implements Material Design specification. The only thing that differentiate it from Materialize is it’s built by the love of React Javascript library from Facebook. It has many beautiful UI components that you may use freely on your web page.
Source: beebom.com

Balsamiq Reviews

Figma Alternatives: 12 Prototyping and Design Tools in 2024
Balsamiq is a design tool that has been available since 2008. It’s easy to use and even boasts active customer service if you need help. The software is beginner-friendly, so there is no learning curve if you’re a newbie.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Material UI should be more popular than Balsamiq. It has been mentiond 75 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 UI mentions (75)

  • Building Forms with zod and react-hook-form
    Material UI: Component library to style our form input fields. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Getting started with NextUI and Next.js
    These UI components and elements usually include Button, Navbar, Tooltip, Tab components, and more. Many UI libraries exist, including React Bootstrap, built on the popular Bootstrap CSS library, and Material-UI, one of the most popular UI component libraries for React. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Comparing React Component Libraries
    Material UI, the undisputed heavyweight champion on this list, was created according to Google’s Material Design guidelines. Launched in 2014, it currently has 71K stars, 23.9K forks, 2284 contributors, and 687K users on GitHub, indicating lots of active maintainers and a vibrant community. A large community also means that bugs are fixed faster. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • How to overwrite Material UI tooltip inline styles?
    I am currently developing a React component that leverages the Material UI Tooltip component. Within my component, I need to manually re-position the Mui Tooltip via the root popper element (MuiTooltip-popper). Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Get value of MenuItem material ui
    I'm using Material UI for Menu and Menu Item.I'm trying to get the value of a menu item, but it doesn't work. Source: about 2 years ago
View more

Balsamiq mentions (30)

  • Tell HN: My Favorite Tools
    A few apps that are a joy to use: https://ia.net/writer for writing. https://usecontrast.com/ for checking contrast. https://sipapp.io/ for picking colors. https://nova.app/ for editing code. https://cleanshot.com/ for screenshots. https://getpixelsnap.com/ for measuring elements on screen. https://netnewswire.com/ for reading things via RSS. https://panic.com/transmit/ for file transfers. https://usefathom.com/... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Ask HN: Best UI design courses for hackers?
    I think the best practical approach for designing UIs is to download (and buy) Balsamic[0] and use that to design UIs. Cut through the nonsense of colours and pixels in the first instance and just lay things out logically and simply. [0] https://balsamiq.com. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Build Products that don’t SUCK
    Create a low-fidelity mockup or wireframe of your MVP using tools like Balsamiq, Sketch, or Figma. Or use an easier-to-use tool like Uizard, which also has text-to-design capabilities. Source: 9 months ago
  • Starting Design Work in a Spreadsheet
    Just for drawing mock app screens, I have found Balsamiq[0] to be pretty good (you can do a bunch of stuff with the trial version itself). Not affiliated with them in any way. [0]: https://balsamiq.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Is there software for building out copywriting for a website?
    Balsamiq has been pretty good for me so far. It's super bare-bones so it's better for copy mockups than actual UX design. It's also a lot easier than Figma. Note that you don't have to use the default comic sans, but I do because it's funny. Source: over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Material UI and Balsamiq, you can also consider the following products

Ant Design - An enterprise-class UI design language and React implementation with a set of high-quality React components, one of best React UI library for enterprises

Invision - Prototyping and collaboration for design teams

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

Moqups - The most stunning HTML5 app for creating resolution-independent SVG mockups, wireframes & interactive prototypes for your next project

Chakra UI - Simple, modular and accessible UI components for your React applications.

Zeplin - Collaboration app for UI designers & frontend developers