Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

mini.css VS Material Design for Bootstrap 4

Compare mini.css VS Material Design for Bootstrap 4 and see what are their differences

mini.css logo mini.css

Responsive, style-agnostic CSS framework

Material Design for Bootstrap 4 logo Material Design for Bootstrap 4

Powerful and free UI KIT for the newest Bootstrap 4 and Material Design
  • mini.css Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-11-11
  • Material Design for Bootstrap 4 Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-21

mini.css features and specs

  • Lightweight
    mini.css is a minimal framework, which means it has a small file size and is optimized for fast loading times.
  • Responsive
    The framework is built with responsive design principles, ensuring that web applications look good on all device sizes.
  • Easy to Use
    mini.css offers a simplified class structure that makes it easy to implement without needing extensive documentation review.
  • Customizable
    Despite its minimal nature, mini.css offers customization options to adapt styles as per specific project requirements.
  • CSS-Only
    Being purely a CSS framework, it doesn't depend on JavaScript, making it a good choice for projects aiming for fast performance.

Possible disadvantages of mini.css

  • Limited Features
    Due to its minimalist design, mini.css might not provide as many components or utility classes as larger frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation.
  • Lack of JavaScript Components
    While the lack of JavaScript dependencies can be a benefit, it also means that dynamic components like modals and carousels need to be implemented separately.
  • Smaller Community
    mini.css has a smaller user base, which means less community support, fewer third-party resources, and extensions compared to more popular frameworks.
  • Limited Popularity
    Its limited popularity might result in fewer online tutorials and examples, potentially increasing the learning curve for new users.

Material Design for Bootstrap 4 features and specs

  • Consistency
    Material Design for Bootstrap (MDBootstrap) combines Google's Material Design principles with Bootstrap 4’s robust framework, ensuring a cohesive and modern design across different components.
  • Rich Component Library
    MDBootstrap offers a wide range of pre-built components such as cards, buttons, navigation elements, and forms, which can speed up development substantially.
  • Responsive Design
    Being built on Bootstrap 4, MDBootstrap is highly responsive out of the box, ensuring that websites look good on both desktop and mobile devices.
  • Customization
    Extensive customization options are available, allowing developers to adjust the design to fit specific needs while maintaining Material Design guidelines.
  • Comprehensive Documentation
    MDBootstrap provides thorough and detailed documentation, including examples, tutorials, and explanations, which can help developers quickly learn and implement the framework.
  • Community and Support
    MDBootstrap has a strong community and offers premium support options, which can be very beneficial for resolving issues and getting advice.

Possible disadvantages of Material Design for Bootstrap 4

  • Learning Curve
    Although MDBootstrap is well-documented, the combination of Material Design principles with Bootstrap might introduce additional concepts for new developers to learn.
  • File Size
    Incorporating both MDBootstrap and Bootstrap may increase the total file size, potentially affecting page load times and performance.
  • Dependency on jQuery
    MDBootstrap relies on jQuery, which could be a downside for projects aiming to minimize dependencies or for developers preferring vanilla JavaScript or other frameworks.
  • Cost for Advanced Features
    While a significant portion of MDBootstrap's features are free, some advanced components and plugins are locked behind a paid subscription, which might be a drawback for developers or companies on a tight budget.
  • Potential Overhead
    Using a framework with extensive features may introduce overhead, particularly if only a small subset of those features are needed for a specific project.
  • Fragmentation Risk
    As MDBootstrap gets updates, keeping up with changes in both Bootstrap 4 and Material Design guidelines might introduce additional maintenance overhead and potential fragmentation.

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to mini.css and Material Design for Bootstrap 4)
Design Tools
22 22%
78% 78
CSS Framework
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
26 26%
74% 74
Web App
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Material Design for Bootstrap 4 seems to be a lot more popular than mini.css. While we know about 11 links to Material Design for Bootstrap 4, we've tracked only 1 mention of mini.css. 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.

mini.css mentions (1)

  • 23 Responsive And Lightweight CSS Frameworks
    Mini.css is cleaner’s lightweight CSS frameworks for creating websites that look beautiful on every device and load faster. It has a smaller size (under 10KB gzipped), along with the responsive grid and modern components that make sure all your users are satisfied and can access the website anytime, anywhere. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago

Material Design for Bootstrap 4 mentions (11)

  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    MDBootstrap - Free for personal & commercial use Bootstrap, Angular, React, and Vue UI Kits with over 700 components, stunning templates, 1-min installation, extensive tutorials & colossal community. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • What do you use for quick UI?
    I used this a while back, if you're into material design it's pretty solid https://mdbootstrap.com/. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Building Composable Commerce with Nuxt, Shopify, and Storyblok Crash Course Part Two
    By default, the IPX image optimizer that the image module is using, needs to have a list of domains that can be used for optimizing the images. For now, what would happen is that our Banner would be displayed, but it wont be optimized. In order to enable the optimization, we need to add the [mdbootstrap.com](http://mdbootstrap.com) to the allowed domains for IPX. Let’s do this below:. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • [FOR HIRE] Django Web Application Developer, CICD Development, and Any Kind of Automation
    Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, AJAX, Bootstrap; I use Django's Jinja2-based templating system. I also have a commercial license for https://mdbootstrap.com/, if you want to build out and customize your own pages with a sleek material design. I'm open to substituting any of the major front-end frameworks in lieu of this vanilla approach. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Top 10 Backend Frameworks in 2022
    Express, or Express.js, is a Node.js based web framework written in JavaScript. It is the standard web framework for Node.js. Express is popularly used in JavaScript development stacks like MEAN, MERN and MEVN along with MongoDB and JavaScript frontend frameworks. Some popular websites using Express are Unsplash, MDBootstrap, Paypal, Coursera, Atlassian, Shopee and Docker Hub. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing mini.css and Material Design for Bootstrap 4, you can also consider the following products

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

Materialize CSS - A modern responsive front-end framework based on Material Design

Craftwork - A collection of User Interface resources made by Craftwork

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

DevExtreme - HTML5 Widgets & SPA Framework for Desktop and Mobile