Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Materialize CSS VS Mural

Compare Materialize CSS VS Mural and see what are their differences

Materialize CSS logo Materialize CSS

A modern responsive front-end framework based on Material Design

Mural logo Mural

MURAL is a visual collaboration workspace for modern teams.
  • Materialize CSS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-14
  • Mural Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-11

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.

Mural features and specs

  • Real-Time Collaboration
    Mural allows multiple users to collaborate in real-time, improving team productivity and brainstorming sessions.
  • User-Friendly Interface
    The platform features an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy for users to create and organize content.
  • Wide Range of Templates
    Mural offers a variety of pre-built templates for different collaborative needs, which helps to streamline the creation process.
  • Integration Capabilities
    Mural integrates with several other productivity tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and JIRA, facilitating smoother workflows.
  • Versatile Use Cases
    The tool can be used for a range of activities including brainstorming, strategy planning, agile workflows, and education, making it highly versatile.
  • Visual Aids and Tools
    Provides various visual aids such as sticky notes, shapes, connectors, and icons that enhance the visualization and understanding of complex ideas.

Possible disadvantages of Mural

  • Subscription Cost
    The subscription-based pricing model can be expensive for small teams or startups with a limited budget.
  • Learning Curve
    While the interface is user-friendly, new users may still experience a learning curve to fully utilize all features and functionalities.
  • Internet Dependency
    Mural is a cloud-based tool, which means it requires a stable internet connection for optimal performance. This can be a limitation in areas with poor connectivity.
  • Limited Offline Access
    The platform offers limited functionality when offline, restricting users from accessing and modifying their work without an internet connection.
  • Complexity in Large Murals
    As projects grow in size and complexity, managing and navigating large murals can become cumbersome and challenging.
  • Mobile App Limitations
    The mobile version of Mural lacks some features available in the desktop version, which can hinder productivity for users who prefer working on mobile devices.

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.

Analysis of Mural

Overall verdict

  • Mural is generally well-regarded as a robust tool for online collaboration, especially useful for teams that prioritize visual and interactive engagement. Its strength lies in its ability to enhance creativity and streamline communication across teams. While some users may find it slightly costly, its functionality and the value it brings to collaborative processes often justify the expense.

Why this product is good

  • Mural is a digital workspace designed to facilitate collaboration, particularly for remote and distributed teams. It offers features like digital whiteboards, visual collaboration tools, templates, and integrations with other software, making it a popular choice for generating ideas, brainstorming, and planning. Users appreciate its intuitive interface and versatility for various use cases such as workshops, design thinking processes, and project management.

Recommended for

    Mural is recommended for remote teams, creative professionals, project managers, educators, and anyone involved in workshops or innovation processes. It's especially suitable for organizations that need a platform to facilitate idea generation, strategic planning, and collaborative problem-solving, regardless of their physical location.

Materialize CSS videos

Build A Travel Agency Theme With Materialize CSS 1.0.0

Mural videos

Advanced features & review / Customer Journey Mapping in Mural

More videos:

  • Review - Introduction to MURAL - 12 Dec 2018
  • Review - Product Review: Wall26 Mural Palm Trees on Tropical Beach

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Materialize CSS and Mural)
Design Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Digital Whiteboard
0 0%
100% 100
CSS Framework
100 100%
0% 0
Productivity
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Materialize CSS and Mural. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

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

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...

Mural Reviews

The 11 best online whiteboards
Remote teams who use MURAL for meetings (like Zapier), will love the digital version of some office staples, from timers (which you can use for focused ideation sprints) to chat boxes. It can be tough to share candid feedback in remote team meetings. That's why we love MURAL's timed voting session, where you can allot a number of votes to each collaborator. To vote, click on...
Source: zapier.com
Top 10 Digital Whiteboard Software for Team Collaboration
Mural is a great platform for design teams with geographical barriers between them. Mural wants you to stop digitizing your content, rather start your work on its digital whiteboard and bounce off ideas.
Source: blog.bit.ai

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Materialize CSS should be more popular than Mural. It has been mentiond 28 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 (28)

  • JavaScript Awesome Package
    Materialize - Responsive front-end framework based on Material Design. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Mistakes Were Made
    Sure, why not use Blazor? It makes life easier for the developers who are primarily backend, to work on the frontend as well. Seems like the better choice. So what's next? The UI library. No shade to the long-time standing Bootstrap, but it's 2023 and there are so many other libraries one could use outside of Bootstrap; TailwindCSS, Bulma, Materialize CSS, just to name a few. Forget that for a minute, maybe we can... - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • 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 / almost 2 years 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 2 years 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 3 years ago
View more

Mural mentions (10)

  • Google Ending Support for Jamboard Devices
    Https://mural.co/ Mural has a free tier. I did not used it much but was nice. - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
  • Interview in 3 hours, any tips?
    How you formulate your research questions e.g. Research objective generation workshop and where you store and manage your backlog e.g. mural, miro, excel, uxbacklog. Source: about 3 years ago
  • Escape from low maturity
    Transparency of work. Whether youre using https://mural.co for collab analysis, usertesting so people can observe or something as simple as https://uxbacklog.co for a research backlog, giving visibility to the team really helps in building awareness and UR expectation but also gets UR in the pipeline / process. Source: about 3 years ago
  • Recommendation for mindmaps
    For instance, mural.co is pretty good. However, it doesnt have the feature I described with which you can colapse knots od your mindmap. Source: over 3 years ago
  • What's your favourite tool for the AWS architecture diagrams for the planning (ideating) stages?
    Super early on in the brainstorming stage we'd use something like mural.co for the "ideating" stage and then quickly move to lucidchart for diagrams and early architecture. Source: over 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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

Miro - Join Millions of users that collaborate from all over the planet using Miro. Experience the power of the #1 visual workspace for innovation. More than 100M users and 250,000 companies are collaborating on the canvas.

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

Figma - Team-based interface design, Figma lets you collaborate on designs in real time.

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

Axure - The most powerful way to plan, prototype and hand off to developers, all without code. Download a free trial and see why professionals choose Axure RP 9.