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Material UI VS React Icons

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

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Material UI logo Material UI

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

React Icons logo React Icons

Include popular icons in your React projects easly with react-icons.
  • Material UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-24
  • React Icons Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-05-21

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.

React Icons features and specs

  • Wide Variety
    React Icons provides a large collection of icons from various popular icon libraries, allowing developers to find and use the icons that best fit their design requirements.
  • Ease of Use
    The library is user-friendly and easy to integrate into React applications. Developers can quickly import and include icons in their components without hassle.
  • Consistent Appearance
    By using React Icons, developers can maintain a consistent look and feel across their application since the icons are standardized and follow modern design guidelines.
  • Customization
    React Icons allows for easy customization through properties, enabling developers to adjust size, color, and other styles to match the application's theme.
  • Lightweight
    Even though it offers a wide range of icons, React Icons is designed to be lightweight and optimized, ensuring that it does not significantly impact the application's performance.

Possible disadvantages of React Icons

  • Limited to Supplied Libraries
    React Icons is limited to the icon libraries it supports, which might not include every icon a developer might need, potentially necessitating additional icon resources.
  • Bundle Size
    Including a large number of icons could increase the bundle size of the application. Developers need to be careful to import only the icons they need.
  • Lack of Advanced Features
    React Icons focuses on basic icon rendering and does not offer more advanced icon management features that some complex applications might require.
  • Potential Overhead
    For projects that only require a few icons, using React Icons might introduce unnecessary overhead compared to importing individual SVGs directly.

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

+ Add

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

More videos:

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

React Icons videos

No React Icons videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Material UI and React Icons)

Material UI

React Icons

Design Tools
97 97%
Design Tools
3% 3
Web Icons
0 0%
Web Icons
100% 100
Developer Tools
96 96%
Developer Tools
4% 4
Development Tools
100 100%
Development Tools
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 React 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.
Source: blog.logrocket.com
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

React Icons Reviews

7 Best Free Icon Libraries
@import url("https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap-icons@1.9.1/font/bootstrap-icons.css");An usage example
Source: www.atatus.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Material UI should be more popular than React 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
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React Icons mentions (11)

  • IcôNES
    Great resource. Has anyone come across a semantic search to navigate these icon libraries? I want to be able to search for “Industry” and get icons returned that show factory, cogs etc. I’ve been using https://react-icons.github.io/react-icons but the same problem there, you search for a string and it just greps across the official icon name. If you don’t know the name you’re not going to find it. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • Top 10 NextJS Icons Library Options for 2025
    2. React Icons Website: https://react-icons.github.io/react-icons/. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • How to Build a Portfolio Website with React
    React Icons: A portfolio needs visual elements to engage visitors. React Icons gives us access to social media icons for your profiles, tech stack icons for your skills section, and UI icons for navigation and interaction. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Top 20 Modern React Libraries To Supercharge Your Next Big Project
    Resource: React Icons Documentation. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • First sprint.
    This was just a tiny change but I did discover something that is really neat from working on this. I found out, from looking into how the other items on the menu has icons, that its using icons from react-icons. Where you can easily import the icons and implement them as components. They also work light and dark mode, where they change automatically when the user change color modes. If it weren't for this, I would... - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Material UI and React 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

The Noun Project - Creating, Sharing and Celebrating the World's Visual Language

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

Flaticon - A database of free vector icons.

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

Rafty UI - Radix UI + Tailwind CSS - React Component Lib

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