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Materialize CSS VS Material Design

Compare Materialize CSS VS Material Design and see what are their differences

Materialize CSS logo Materialize CSS

A modern responsive front-end framework based on Material Design

Material Design logo Material Design

Google Material Design
  • Materialize CSS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-14
  • Material Design Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-04-03

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.

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 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

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 Materialize CSS and Material Design)
Developer Tools
92 92%
8% 8
Design Tools
86 86%
14% 14
CSS Framework
93 93%
7% 7
Development Tools
78 78%
22% 22

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 Material Design

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 Bootstrapโ€™s 12-column grid format. The best part? Its extensive color palettes. So, if you want to work with Material Design (Googleโ€™s...
Source: hackr.io
15 Best CSS Frameworks: Professional Bootstrap and Foundation Alternatives
Itโ€™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...

Material Design Reviews

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

Based on our record, Materialize CSS should be more popular than Material Design. It has been mentiond 26 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.

Materialize CSS mentions (26)

  • Top 5 Best CSS Frameworks for Responsive Web Design in 2024
    Materialize is a modern CSS framework based on Googleโ€™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 / about 1 year 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 / over 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: over 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 / over 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 / almost 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 Materialize CSS and Material Design, you can also consider the following products

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

Semantic UI - A UI Component library implemented using a set of specifications designed around natural language

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

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

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

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