Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Material UI VS Bootstrap Icons

Compare Material UI VS Bootstrap Icons and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Material UI logo Material UI

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

Bootstrap Icons logo Bootstrap Icons

Official open source SVG icon library for Bootstrap
  • Material UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-24
  • Bootstrap Icons Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-01

Material UI features and specs

  • Comprehensive Component Library
    Material UI offers a wide range of pre-built components that adhere to Google's Material Design guidelines, making it easier to build aesthetically pleasing user interfaces quickly.
  • Customizability
    Material UI components are highly customizable. Developers can easily adjust styles, themes, and behaviors to match specific project requirements.
  • Active Community and Support
    Material UI has a large and active community of developers. This means better support, frequent updates, and a wealth of resources like tutorials and documentation.
  • Improved Productivity
    The pre-built components and templates can greatly reduce the time and effort required to develop UI elements, thereby increasing development productivity.
  • Cross-Browser Compatibility
    Designed to work across multiple browsers, Material UI ensures a consistent user experience regardless of the platform.
  • Accessibility
    Material UI includes features that improve accessibility, conforming to WCAG guidelines to create more inclusive web applications.

Bootstrap Icons features and specs

  • Comprehensive Collection
    Bootstrap Icons offer a large library of icons, which covers most common types of user interface needs, making it convenient for developers who need a one-stop solution.
  • Consistency
    Icons are designed to harmonize with Bootstrap's styling, ensuring a consistent look and feel with Bootstrap based projects.
  • Open Source
    Bootstrap Icons are free to use and open source, which enhances accessibility for developers working on different types of projects.
  • Ease of Use
    Bootstrap Icons are simple to implement, especially for those already using Bootstrap, as they integrate seamlessly into projects.
  • SVG Support
    Icons are available as SVGs, providing scalability and flexibility in design without loss of quality.

Possible disadvantages of Bootstrap Icons

  • Limited to Bootstrap Users
    While the icons can be used independently, they are primarily designed for Bootstrap, which may not appeal to developers using other frameworks.
  • Design Limitations
    Design style may not suit all project aesthetics, as the icons follow a standard Bootstrap visual style that might not align with every project's theme.
  • Feature Set
    Compared to some dedicated icon packs, Bootstrap Icons might lack certain specialized icons or variations, which could be restrictive for complex applications.
  • Frequent Updates
    While updates ensure new additions, they may also result in breaking changes which require developers to modify their existing codebases regularly.

Analysis of Material UI

Overall verdict

  • Material UI is considered a strong choice for developers who want to create applications with a modern and clean look, leveraging Google's Material Design principles. Its rich set of components and strong community support make it a reliable option for both small and large projects.

Why this product is good

  • Material UI (MUI) is a widely-used React component library that implements Google's Material Design guidelines, providing a consistent and modern aesthetic for web applications.
  • It offers a comprehensive set of customizable components, making it easier for developers to build responsive and visually appealing UIs.
  • MUI is well-documented and has a large community, which means plenty of third-party resources, tutorials, and support are available.
  • The library is continuously updated and maintained, ensuring compatibility with the latest versions of React and web standards.

Recommended for

  • Developers looking for a ready-to-use set of components adhering to Material Design, without sacrificing flexibility.
  • Projects requiring a quick development turnaround where a polished and professional UI is needed.
  • Teams that prefer not to spend extensive time on UI design and implementation while still achieving a high-quality look.

Analysis of Bootstrap Icons

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Bootstrap Icons is considered good. It offers a robust collection of high-quality icons that integrate smoothly with Bootstrap and other frameworks, providing a reliable resource for developers looking to enhance their web applications with scalable vector graphics.

Why this product is good

  • Bootstrap Icons is a well-regarded library for several reasons. First, it is created and maintained by the team behind Bootstrap, ensuring a high level of quality and consistency. The icons are designed to work seamlessly with Bootstrap components, providing a cohesive design experience. Additionally, the library is open-source, regularly updated, and offers a comprehensive set of icons that cover many common use cases. Its ease of use, compatibility, and accessibility make it a practical choice for web developers.

Recommended for

    Bootstrap Icons is especially recommended for developers and designers using Bootstrap for their projects, as the icons are tailored to integrate effortlessly with Bootstrap's grid and component structure. Additionally, it is a great choice for any web development project that requires a comprehensive set of icons due to its ease of use and high-quality design.

Material UI videos

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

More videos:

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

Bootstrap Icons videos

Bootstrap 5 Crash Course Tutorial #13 - Bootstrap Icons

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Material UI and Bootstrap Icons)
Design Tools
92 92%
8% 8
Web Icons
0 0%
100% 100
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Vector Icons
0 0%
100% 100

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 Bootstrap Icons

Material UI Reviews

  1. oliviertassinari

15 Top Bootstrap Alternatives For Frontend Developers in 2024
One of the highlighting features of this framework like Bootstrap is that it is based on Google's Material Design, offering a variety of reusable components that can be incorporated as needed. A major drawback of Material UI is its limitation to only React-based components. Additionally, it uses CSS-in-JS (a technique of writing CSS styling in JavaScript), which may not be...
Source: coursesity.com
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

Bootstrap Icons Reviews

7 Best Free Icon Libraries
The Bootstrap Icons package can be installed via npm or manually downloaded. There are several ways to include Bootstrap Icons on your site, depending on your setup:
Source: www.atatus.com
Top FontAwesome alternatives to use on your websites
Everyone is familiar with Bootstrap for the most part. It is one of the most highly used HTML, CSS and JS libraries out today. But fewer people are aware of Bootstrap Icons, which feature over 1300 icons that can be used as SVG items or web fonts for free.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Material UI should be more popular than Bootstrap Icons. 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 / about 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years 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: about 3 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 3 years ago
View more

Bootstrap Icons mentions (23)

  • Icons gem for Phlex
    When it comes to building sleek, interactive UIs, having access to a robust set of icons is essential. Over the last few weeks, I've been migrating one of my projects from ERBs to Phlex. During this process, I found myself frequently reaching for SVG icons from popular libraries like Heroicons, Bootstrap icons, and Flag icons. After some frustration with manual integration into a Shared::Icon Phlex component, I... - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • How to create a Blazor app for WASM, Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android
    In my previous Blazor project, I used Font Awesome icons and Google Fonts, but now I use embedded font files and Bootstrap Icons because I think they work better with Bootstrap 5. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Modern Dropdown component HTML
    An icon to indicate the state of the dropdown (open or closed). Note that the svg used is adapted from Bootstrap icons. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • Show HN: LogoMVP – Generate quick, professional logos for your MVP
    Hey, great work! You could easily add the Bootstrap Icons library to this. And then perhaps the Noun Project. https://icons.getbootstrap.com/ https://thenounproject.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • My open source video editor made with Godot, editor layout progress + Roadmap
    Not sure if you already are using, but bootstrap has a lot of readymade icons for a project like this. Source: over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Material UI and Bootstrap Icons, 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

Heroicons - Beautiful, free SVG icons from the makers of Tailwind CSS.

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

Font Awesome - Font Awesome makes it easy to add vector icons and social logos to your website. And version 5 is redesigned and built from the ground up!

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

Feather Icons - Simply beautiful open source icons