Software Alternatives & Startups

Material UI VS React Admin

Compare Material UI VS React Admin 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

React Admin logo React Admin

A frontend Framework for building B2B applications running in the browser on top of REST/GraphQL APIs, using ES6, React and Material Design
  • Material UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-24
  • React Admin Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-20

React Admin

$ Details
freemium €135 / Monthly
Release Date
2017 January

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.

React Admin features and specs

  • Component-Based Architecture
    React Admin utilizes a component-based architecture that promotes reusability and modularity, allowing developers to build complex interfaces with less effort.
  • Rich Ecosystem
    Being a React-based framework, React Admin benefits from a vast ecosystem of libraries and tools which can be easily integrated, providing enhanced functionality and scalability.
  • Customizable and Extensible
    Developers can customize and extend React Admin to fit specific needs, thanks to its high degree of flexibility and comprehensive support for custom components.
  • Built-in Data Providers
    React Admin comes with built-in data providers, making it easy to connect with a variety of REST, GraphQL, or other APIs out of the box.
  • Active Community and Maintenance
    Maintained by Marmelab, React Admin has an active community and is well-maintained, ensuring regular updates and improvements.

Possible disadvantages of React Admin

  • Steep Learning Curve
    Beginners might find React Admin challenging at first, especially if they are not familiar with React or the paradigm of component-based architecture.
  • Limited Server-Side Rendering
    React Admin is primarily designed for client-side rendering, which can be limiting for applications that require robust server-side rendering features for SEO purposes.
  • Opinionated Framework
    While being opinionated can be advantageous for some, it might restrict developers who are looking for more freedom in how they architect their applications.
  • Performance Overhead
    The abstraction and number of features included might introduce some performance overhead, especially in large-scale applications with complex data interactions.
  • Dependency on Third-Party Libraries
    React Admin's reliance on third-party libraries can sometimes lead to issues with compatibility or require additional learning for integration and use.

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

React Admin videos

10 Best React Admin Templates in 2022 | ReactJS Admin Templates

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Material UI and React Admin)
Design Tools
82 82%
18% 18
Developer Tools
75 75%
25% 25
CSS Framework
100 100%
0% 0
Open Source
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 React Admin

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, 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.

React Admin Reviews

We have no reviews of React Admin yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Material UI should be more popular than React Admin. 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 / over 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 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 / 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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React Admin mentions (26)

  • Top 20 Modern React Libraries To Supercharge Your Next Big Project
    Resource: React Admin Documentation. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • How to build a CMS with Supabase and React-admin
    I've been working with react-admin on various projects, some of which required basic CMS features in addition to the core application. We've used headless CMS like Strapi, Directus, or Prismic for these features. However, react-admin is so powerful that it can be used to build the CMS part, too. That's why I worked on a CMS proof-of-concept using react-admin for the admin UI and Supabase (which provides a REST... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • A Year of Transformation: Reflecting on 2024's Journey in Tech and Beyond
    I was learning React JS front end and in this journey of self learning, I have achieved many milestone like utilizing react-admin framework. I also implemented two-factor authentication using Authenticator tools with react-admin framework. It was a very challenging job to include two-factor alongside react-admin authentication as there is no tutorial available for it. But this is very much required in the era of... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Building a Complete React CRM App with Atomic CRM 🛠️
    With a simple relational data model, developers can easily modify the system to store additional data. Its component-based architecture allows for replacing or customizing any part of the application, giving developers full control over the user experience. Built using React and react-admin, two widely supported frameworks, it comes with a rich library of pre-built components ready for use. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Major updates from the open source community: Release Radar · June 2024
    Whenever I see the word "framework", I can't help but think of the Linebreakers' song "We're Gonna Build a Framework". That aside, React-admin has over 25,000 users around the world. It's a single-page application framework, allowing you to build web apps running on top of REST/GraphQL APIs, using TypeScript, React and Material Design. React-admin's latest update brings refined lists and forms, dependency update,... - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

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

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

Refine - A React Framework for building internal tools, admin panels, dashboards & B2B apps with unmatched flexibilty.

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

Mantine - React library, 60+ hooks and components with dark theme support and focus on accessibility

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

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