Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Material UI VS Ionic Framework

Compare Material UI VS Ionic Framework 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

Ionic Framework logo Ionic Framework

A front-end SDK to develop applications with HTML5 , CSS3 and JavaScript.
  • Material UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-24
  • Ionic Framework Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-22

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.

Ionic Framework features and specs

  • Cross-Platform Development
    Ionic allows developers to create applications that work smoothly on both iOS and Android from a single codebase, reducing development time and costs.
  • Rich Pre-Built Components
    Ionic comes with a vast library of pre-built UI components that are customizable, enabling quicker development and a consistent user experience across different devices.
  • Integration with Popular Frameworks
    Ionic can be easily integrated with popular front-end frameworks such as Angular, React, and Vue, providing flexibility for developers to use the tools they are familiar with.
  • Active Community and Ecosystem
    Ionic has a strong and active community, along with extensive documentation and a variety of plugins and third-party extensions that can be utilized to extend app functionalities.
  • Performance Optimization
    Ionic has made significant improvements in performance, particularly with the use of tools like Capacitor, which helps achieve near-native performance for hybrid applications.

Possible disadvantages of Ionic Framework

  • Dependency on Web Technologies
    Since Ionic relies heavily on web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, performance might not be as optimal as fully native apps, especially in graphics-intensive applications.
  • Learning Curve
    While Ionic is easier to pick up for web developers, those unfamiliar with Angular, React, or Vue might face a steep learning curve initially.
  • Limited Access to Native APIs
    Even though Ionic provides plugins through Capacitor and Cordova for accessing native APIs, there might be scenarios where certain native functionalities are not fully supported or require custom development.
  • Larger App Sizes
    Hybrid applications built with Ionic often have larger file sizes compared to native apps due to the overhead of web runtime and additional libraries.
  • Browser Compatibility Issues
    As Ionic apps run inside a WebView, inconsistencies across different browsers and versions can sometimes lead to unexpected behavior, requiring additional testing and debugging efforts.

Material UI videos

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

More videos:

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

Ionic Framework videos

Why You SHOULD Use the Ionic Framework

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Material UI and Ionic Framework)
Design Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Development Tools
41 41%
59% 59
Developer Tools
80 80%
20% 20
JavaScript Framework
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 Ionic Framework

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

Ionic Framework Reviews

THE BEST 34 APP DEVELOPMENT SOFTWARE IN 2022 LIST
One codebase. Any platform. Now in React and Angular. Ionic Framework is an open-source mobile UI toolkit for building high-quality, cross-platform native and web app experiences. Move faster with a single codebase, running everywhere. Free and open-source, Ionic offers a library of mobile-optimized UI components, gestures, and tools for building fast highly interactive apps.
10 React Native Alternatives
Ionic Framework is a free, open-source mobile UI toolkit used for building high-quality cross-platform applications for Android, iOS, and from the web all from a single codebase.

Social recommendations and mentions

Ionic Framework might be a bit more popular than Material UI. We know about 90 links to it since March 2021 and only 75 links to Material UI. 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 / almost 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: almost 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

Ionic Framework mentions (90)

  • Top 10 Essential Tools for Android Development
    Ionic is an open-source framework for building cross-platform mobile applications using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It allows developers to build apps for Android, iOS, and the web from a single codebase. Ionic is known for its flexibility and wide range of UI components, making it easy to build modern, responsive apps. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Building a GenAI Fitness App with Gemini
    For the frontend, I chose Ionic and Angular, which enabled me to create a mobile-first app that could be deployed on the web right away while it could also be shipped as native for both iOS and Android. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Design Systems with Web Components
    I was recently able to sit down with some of the core members of Ionic, who also created Stencil a toolchain for building Design Systems and Progressive Web Apps. We talked at great length how typically companies are approaching Ionic from a Design Team and need help building components. As a developer I wanted to talk about the Web Components that are used within the Design System first. There was a decent amount... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Turning HTML, CSS, JS project into an app
    Look into Ionic Framework https://ionicframework.com/ or Cordova. They might be overkill for what you’re trying to do, but they allow you to create cross-platform apps via html/css/js. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Getting Started with PayloadCMS & Vue JS
    Ionic Framework UI Components are used to build a website and then a mobile application is built using Ionic Capacitor. Ionic UI components are not required but are used for UX. The vue js code presented here will work fine in a separate application. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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

React Native - A framework for building native apps with React

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

Flutter - Build beautiful native apps in record time 🚀

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

Apache Cordova - Platform for building native mobile applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript