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Material UI VS Material Design

Compare Material UI VS Material Design 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

Material Design logo Material Design

Google Material Design
  • Material UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-24
  • Material Design Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-04-03

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.

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.

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

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Material UI and Material Design)
Design Tools
87 87%
13% 13
Developer Tools
91 91%
9% 9
Development Tools
88 88%
12% 12
CSS Framework
89 89%
11% 11

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 Material Design

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.

Material Design Reviews

We have no reviews of Material Design yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

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

Material Design mentions (16)

  • Release Radar ยท 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 / about 1 year ago
  • Building a design system with Radix
    Some examples of popular design systems include Googleโ€™s Material Design, the Atlassian Design System, and Carbon Design System by IBM. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 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 / over 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: over 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 / over 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Material UI and Material Design, 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

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

hue.tools - hue.tools is an open source toolbox.

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

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

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