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Material UI VS Draft.js

Compare Material UI VS Draft.js 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

Draft.js logo Draft.js

Rich Text Editor Framework for React
  • Material UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-24
  • Draft.js Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-03-29

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.

Possible disadvantages of Material UI

  • Performance Overhead
    The inclusion of numerous pre-built components and styles can introduce performance overhead, especially in larger applications.
  • Learning Curve
    Despite its extensive documentation, new developers or those not familiar with Material Design may find it challenging to learn and implement Material UI effectively.
  • Dependency on Material Design
    Material UI strictly adheres to Material Design principles, which may not be suitable for all projects or could limit creative freedom for some designers.
  • Bundle Size
    Incorporating Material UI into a project can significantly increase the bundle size, affecting the overall load time of the web application.
  • Customization Complexity
    While highly customizable, the process of overriding default styles and components can sometimes be complex and cumbersome, requiring an in-depth understanding of both Material UI and CSS-in-JS.
  • Dependency on React
    Material UI is tightly integrated with React, meaning it can't be easily used in non-React projects, limiting its applicability.

Draft.js features and specs

  • Rich Text Editing
    Draft.js provides a powerful framework for building rich text editors with a high level of customization, allowing developers to implement various formatting and styling options with ease.
  • Immutable.js Integration
    Draft.js uses Immutable.js to manage editor state, which can lead to improved performance and easier state management, as it helps avoid unnecessary re-renders and mutations.
  • Extensibility
    The library offers the ability to create custom blocks, decorations, and plugins, enabling developers to extend and tailor the editor's behavior to their specific needs.
  • Facebook Support
    Draft.js is developed and maintained by Facebook, which suggests a certain level of reliability and indicates a strong backing in terms of updates and community support.
  • Comprehensive Documentation
    The library is well-documented, with comprehensive guides and examples that help developers get started quickly and understand the full potential of the framework.

Possible disadvantages of Draft.js

  • Complexity
    Draft.js has a steep learning curve, especially for developers who are not familiar with React or Immutable.js, as it requires understanding its unique architecture and concepts.
  • Bundle Size
    The inclusion of Immutable.js can lead to a larger bundle size for web applications, which might be a concern for developers aiming for minimalistic and fast-loading applications.
  • Limited Built-in Features
    Draft.js provides a basic editor out of the box, which means developers often need to implement or find third-party plugins for advanced features like tables, embedded media, or collaborative editing.
  • Customizability Overhead
    While high customizability is a strength, it also means that basic implementations may involve more boilerplate code and setup compared to other, more out-of-the-box solutions.
  • Sparse Updates
    Draft.js does not receive updates as frequently as some other open-source projects, which can lead to uncertainty around the timeline for bug fixes or new feature implementations.

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.

Material UI videos

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

More videos:

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

Draft.js videos

Live coding โ€“ย Draft.js copy-paste fix

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Material UI and Draft.js)
Design Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
79 79%
21% 21
Text Editors
0 0%
100% 100
CSS Framework
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 Draft.js

Material UI Reviews

  1. oliviertassinari

The Best Component Libraries for React, Next.js & Tailwind UI
A: Many high-quality component libraries are open-source and free to use, such as Material UI and Chakra UI. Some libraries offer premium components or themes for a fee, but the free versions are often sufficient for many projects.
Source: gist.github.com
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, thereโ€™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 โ€œflexibility...
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.

Draft.js Reviews

We have no reviews of Draft.js yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Material UI should be more popular than Draft.js. It has been mentiond 76 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 (76)

  • JavaScript Awesome Package
    Material-UI - React components for faster and easier web development. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Building Forms with zod and react-hook-form
    Material UI: Component library to style our form input fields. - Source: dev.to / about 3 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 3 years ago
  • Comparing React Component Libraries
    Material UI, the undisputed heavyweight champion on this list, was created according to Googleโ€™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 / almost 4 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: over 4 years ago
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Draft.js mentions (28)

  • Rebuilding a web text editor
    Therefore, we wanted to choose a low-level framework that would solve most of the issues related to text input. We settled on Draft.js, which was quite popular at the time (2020). All we had to do was integrate it into our current system, attach it to the data storage, and implement the ability to edit styles with our constructorโ€”done. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Introducing react-rte-light: A Lightweight Rich Text Editor for React
    Are you looking for a lightweight, flexible, and modern rich text editor for your React applications? Look no further! I'm excited to share react-rte-light, a TypeScript-based rich text editor built with Draft.js. Itโ€™s designed to work seamlessly with React 16.8 to 19, offering a minimal-dependency alternative to heavier editors like React Quill. Whether you're building a blog platform, a note-taking app, or a... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Lexical 0.24 with Vanilla JS: Getting started
    Lexical is an open source project and considered the successor of Draft.js. It is primarily developed by Meta, licensed under MIT. It is not restricted to React, but supports Vanilla JS, too. The flexibility enables us to integrate it with other JS libraries such as Svelte and Vue. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Ask HN: Is there a licensable/free version of the "Substack" email editor?
    - https://draftjs.org/ If you're talking about liking the full experience with settings and previews, that I'm afraid is all custom built. I can't imagine an open source reusable one being out there, but I could be wrong! - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • Which Rich Text Editor to use ?
    I've always used Quill and always satisfied with it. It can be adapted to React Native as well. Despite the most popular RTE is Draft js it has some limitations on mobile. Source: about 3 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Material UI and Draft.js, you can also consider the following products

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

Quill - Powerful, API-driven rich text editor

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

Next.js - A small framework for server-rendered universal JavaScript apps

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

ProseMirror - A toolkit for building rich-text editors on the web