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Material UI VS react-testing-library

Compare Material UI VS react-testing-library 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-testing-library logo react-testing-library

[`React Testing Library`][gh] builds on top of `DOM Testing Library` by adding
  • Material UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-24
  • react-testing-library Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-08-21

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-testing-library features and specs

  • Focused on user-centric testing
    React Testing Library encourages tests that closely resemble how users interact with an application. This approach makes tests more reliable and meaningful.
  • Reduces coupling to implementation details
    By encouraging developers to interact with components via the DOM, the library minimizes dependencies on component internals, making tests less prone to breaking from refactors.
  • Improved test readability
    Tests written with React Testing Library are generally easier to read and understand because they focus on what the user sees and does, rather than the internal logic of the components.
  • Comprehensive query options
    The library provides a wide range of query methods (e.g., getByText, getByRole), which makes it easy to select elements in ways that resemble how users think.
  • Active community and well-maintained
    React Testing Library has a strong, active community and it's maintained by experienced developers who keep the library up-to-date with React's evolution.

Possible disadvantages of react-testing-library

  • Limited support for non-DOM testing
    The library is heavily focused on DOM interactions, making it less suited for testing non-DOM logic or scenarios that don't involve user interactions.
  • Can be slower
    Tests that involve the DOM can be slower compared to tests that interact directly with component methods and state, which can lead to longer test execution times.
  • Learning curve for traditional testers
    Developers who are used to testing implementation details with other tools (like Enzyme) might find it challenging to adjust to the user-centric approach advocated by React Testing Library.
  • Potential for less granular control
    Because the library encourages testing through the UI, developers might find it harder to test specific, isolated internal behaviors of components that aren't directly visible to users.
  • Dependencies on browser APIs
    The library's reliance on browser APIs means that tests may behave differently in different environments or may require polyfills for certain features, leading to potential inconsistencies.

Material UI videos

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

More videos:

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

react-testing-library videos

React unit testing with Jest & React-testing-library

More videos:

  • Review - Test a React Component that renders a list with react-testing-library

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Material UI and react-testing-library)
Design Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
72 72%
28% 28
Automated Testing
0 0%
100% 100
Development Tools
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 react-testing-library

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

react-testing-library Reviews

We have no reviews of react-testing-library yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, react-testing-library should be more popular than Material UI. It has been mentiond 133 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 / 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: 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-testing-library mentions (133)

  • Migrating from AngularJS to React
    Additionally, I wrote Jest and Enzyme unit tests to demonstrate how to go about unit testing the components, as test driven development (TDD) is another methodology my organization subscribes to. Jest is a unit testing framework that actually shipped with React if you use the Create React App CLI to make a new React project. And at the time, Enzyme was created by Airbnb and added additional functionality to Jest... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • How To Convert HTML CSS JS To React JS
    After converting your components, take some time to test your application. Make sure everything is working as expected. React’s development server automatically reloads your application whenever you save changes, which makes testing a lot easier. Tools like Jest and React Testing Library are also available to help you write tests for your components. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • How To Write Unit Test Cases In React JS
    React Testing Library: For testing React components from a user’s point of view, visit the React Testing Library documentation. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Top 20 Modern React Libraries To Supercharge Your Next Big Project
    Resource: React Testing Library Documentation. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Next.js Testing Guide: Unit and E2E Tests with Vitest & Playwright
    In this article, you will write unit tests in Next.js client components and synchronous server components using Vitest and React Testing Library, and you will write end-to-end tests for your async server components using Playwright. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Material UI and react-testing-library, you can also consider the following products

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

Jest - Jest is a delightful JavaScript Testing Framework with a focus on simplicity.

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

Storybook - Storybook is an open source tool for developing UI components in isolation for React, Vue, and Angular. It makes building stunning UIs organized and efficient.

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

Enzyme - Enzyme is a JavaScript testing utility for React.