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Materialize CSS VS Autoprefixer

Compare Materialize CSS VS Autoprefixer and see what are their differences

Materialize CSS logo Materialize CSS

A modern responsive front-end framework based on Material Design

Autoprefixer logo Autoprefixer

autoprefixer - Parse CSS and add vendor prefixes to rules by Can I Use
  • Materialize CSS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-14
  • Autoprefixer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-01

Materialize CSS features and specs

  • Responsive Design
    Materialize CSS provides a responsive grid system, making it easier to create layouts that work well on various screen sizes and devices.
  • Material Design
    Adheres to Google's Material Design principles, offering a modern and professional look that is consistent across web applications.
  • Component Variety
    Offers a wide range of pre-built components, including forms, buttons, cards, and navigation bars, which helps speed up development.
  • Customization
    Provides options to customize components using Sass, making it flexible for specific design needs.
  • Built-in JavaScript
    Includes built-in JavaScript components like modals, carousels, and tabs, which enhance functionality without requiring additional libraries.

Possible disadvantages of Materialize CSS

  • Learning Curve
    Although it follows Material Design guidelines, there is a learning curve associated with understanding and implementing its various components and classes.
  • File Size
    Including the full library can make your project heavier, affecting load times, especially for users on slower connections.
  • Customization Complexity
    While customizable, deeply customizing or overriding default styles can sometimes be complicated and time-consuming.
  • Dependency on jQuery
    Some components still rely on jQuery, adding to the library size and potentially conflicting with modern JavaScript practices.
  • Community Support
    Compared to larger frameworks like Bootstrap, Materialize CSS has a smaller community, which can result in fewer third-party resources and plugins.

Autoprefixer features and specs

  • Automated CSS Vendor Prefixing
    Autoprefixer automatically adds vendor prefixes to CSS rules, ensuring compatibility with different browsers without manually writing prefixes.
  • Keep Up with Browser Updates
    Autoprefixer stays updated with the latest information about browser support, allowing developers to focus on writing standard CSS and not worry about changing requirements.
  • Configurable Browsing Target
    Developers can specify the target browsers and versions, making it possible to control the level of backward compatibility needed for a project.
  • Integrates with Build Tools
    It integrates smoothly with various build tools and task runners like webpack, Gulp, and Grunt, streamlining the development workflow.
  • Reduces File Size
    Autoprefixer only applies necessary prefixes based on specified browser support, which can help keep the CSS footprint small compared to manually adding excess prefixes.

Possible disadvantages of Autoprefixer

  • Potential Overhead
    There might be an initial setup time to properly configure Autoprefixer with the desired build tools and browser targets.
  • Dependence on Tools
    Using Autoprefixer requires integration into a build process or toolchain, which might not suit smaller projects or those without a build process.
  • Learning Curve
    For developers who are new to post-processing tools, understanding and correctly applying tool configurations might take some learning time.
  • Not a Silver Bullet
    While Autoprefixer handles vendor prefixing, it doesn't correct other CSS-related issues, which might still require manual adjustments and cross-browser testing.

Analysis of Materialize CSS

Overall verdict

  • Materialize CSS is a good choice if you're looking for a framework that emphasizes Material Design and comes with a sleek, modern interface. It's particularly useful for developers who want to quickly integrate Google's design philosophy without delving into custom styling or layout creation.

Why this product is good

  • Materialize CSS is a front-end framework based on Material Design principles developed by Google. It provides a comprehensive set of UI components that help developers create visually appealing and responsive web applications quickly. The framework includes a variety of pre-styled components like buttons, forms, cards, and much more, which adhere to the Material Design guidelines. This consistency in design components helps ensure a cohesive and professional look across web applications. Additionally, it simplifies responsive design with a grid system that's easy to implement, and it comes with excellent documentation and a supportive community.

Recommended for

    Materialize CSS is recommended for teams and developers who prefer Google's Material Design aesthetic, are building applications with a focus on rapid UI development, and value consistency and ease of use. It's also great for projects where a pre-existing UI library speeds up the development process, such as prototypes, admin dashboards, or smaller web applications. However, for highly customized UI components or non-Material Design projects, other frameworks might be more suitable.

Materialize CSS videos

Build A Travel Agency Theme With Materialize CSS 1.0.0

Autoprefixer videos

Stop Worrying about Vendor Prefixes with Autoprefixer | XI to Eye vol 8

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Materialize CSS and Autoprefixer)
Design Tools
92 92%
8% 8
CSS Framework
83 83%
17% 17
Developer Tools
93 93%
7% 7
Development Tools
74 74%
26% 26

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Materialize CSS and Autoprefixer

Materialize CSS Reviews

15 Top Bootstrap Alternatives For Frontend Developers in 2024
Material Design is a design language that combines classic principles of successful design with innovation and technology. One of the downsides of Materialize is that it does not support older versions of web browsers, and sometimes it does not handle certain nestings of components properly, resulting in an odd appearance.
Source: coursesity.com
9 Best Bootstrap Alternatives | Best Frontend Frameworks [2024]
Materialize is a modern responsive front-end framework based on the Material Design principles of Google. Material design is a design language created by Google, which combines traditional design methods with innovations and technology.
Source: hackr.io
Top 10 Best CSS Frameworks for Front-End Developers in 2022
Created by Google in 2014, Materialize is a responsive UI framework for websites and Android apps. It provides many ready-to-use components, classes, and starter templates. It is compatible with Sass and has a responsive layout based on Bootstrap’s 12-column grid format. The best part? Its extensive color palettes. So, if you want to work with Material Design (Google’s...
Source: hackr.io
15 Best CSS Frameworks: Professional Bootstrap and Foundation Alternatives
It’s specifically designed to help you develop faster using a standard template and customizable components. As the name suggests, Materialize is based on the basic principles of Material Design.
10 of the Best Bootstrap Alternatives
Materialize is a Design-inspired front-end framework that offers everything you need to create beautiful websites and apps. It includes a responsive grid system, CSS components, and animation libraries. Materialize is also easy to use and customizable, making it the perfect choice for any project. Furthermore, a single basic responsive framework across all phases minimizes...

Autoprefixer Reviews

We have no reviews of Autoprefixer yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Materialize CSS might be a bit more popular than Autoprefixer. We know about 26 links to it since March 2021 and only 22 links to Autoprefixer. 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.

Materialize CSS mentions (26)

  • Top 5 Best CSS Frameworks for Responsive Web Design in 2024
    Materialize is a modern CSS framework based on Google’s Material Design. It was created and designed by Google to provide a unified and consistent user interface across all its products. Materialize is focused on user experience as it integrates animations and components to provide feedback to users. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Front-end Framework: Comparing Bootstrap, Foundation and Materialize
    Materialize was created by a team of developers at Google, inspired by the principles of Material Design. Material Design is a design language developed by Google that emphasizes tactile surfaces, realistic lighting, and bold, graphic interfaces. Materialize aims to bring these principles to web development by providing a framework with ready-to-use components and styles based on Material Design. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Took a web development job without much experience, am I doomed?
    If you wanna make it look nice use materialize css works great with Django templates. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Best 3 Bootstrap Alternatives
    You can also visit the Materialize website and GitHub repository which currently has garnered over 38k likes and has been forked over 4k times by developers. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • All About Hacktober Fest 2022 You Need To Know
    This repository consists of files required to deploy a Web App or PWA created with Materialize Css. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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Autoprefixer mentions (22)

  • Exploring Tailwind Oxide
    Unlike other frameworks, you can’t just npm install and write code. Take one look at the Tailwind CSS installation page and before you even begin, you need to decide if you want to install it with the CLI or as a PostCSS plugin. Wait, you know CSS, but what is PostCSS? Then, you keep reading and you see something about CSS preprocessor and you might wonder what that is too. Then, you see that you not only have to... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Native CSS nesting now supported by all major browsers!
    Mixins - This allows you to reuse a set of rules inside another rule. I never really found a good use case for mixins. They were available to me when I was still using Bootstrap with LESS, but using them seemed a little complex, because you always need to look up what they do and the resulting CSS output is not always clear. If you're thinking of using them for browser prefixes (e.g. -webkit-transform), I would... - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • 23 of the best Eleventy Themes (Starters) for 2023
    Simple, fast, and a little bit opinionated, Eleventy Plus Vite features Eleventy 2.0.0-canary, the new Eleventy 2.0 Dev Server with live reload, Vite 3.0 as Middleware in Eleventy Dev Server (using eleventy-plugin-vite), build output post-processing by Vite (with Rollup), CSS/Sass post-processing with PostCSS including Autoprefixer and cssnano, a custom CSS/Sass structure, basic fluid typography based on Utopia,... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • The Complete Guide for Setting Up React App from Scratch (feat. TypeScript)
    w/ postcss-preset-env(v7.8.3): convert modern CSS into something most browsers can understand, determining the polyfills you need based on your targeted browsers or runtime environments. It takes the support data that comes from MDN and Can I Use and determine from a browserlist whether those transformations are needed. It also packs Autoprefixer within and shares the list with it, so prefixes are only applied... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • How do I deal with CSS for Safari?
    As others have said, you need to normalize. Also, you may need something like autoprefixer if you're using styles that have different vendor prefixes. https://github.com/postcss/autoprefixer. Source: over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Materialize CSS and Autoprefixer, you can also consider the following products

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

PostCSS - Increase code readability. Add vendor prefixes to CSS rules using values from Can I Use. Autoprefixer will use the data based on current browser popularity and property support to apply prefixes for you.

Tailwind CSS - A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.

Sass - Syntatically Awesome Style Sheets

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

Less - Less extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. Less runs on both the server-side (with Node. js and Rhino) or client-side (modern browsers only).