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React Toolbox VS Angular Material

Compare React Toolbox VS Angular Material and see what are their differences

React Toolbox logo React Toolbox

A set of React components implementing Google's Material Design specification with the power of CSS Modules - react-toolbox/react-toolbox

Angular Material logo Angular Material

Angular Material is both a UI Component framework and a reference implementation of Google's Material Design Specification.
  • React Toolbox Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-07
  • Angular Material Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-01-24

React Toolbox features and specs

  • Material Design Compliance
    React Toolbox offers components that are designed according to the Material Design guidelines, ensuring a consistent and attractive user interface.
  • Rich Component Library
    It provides a wide range of components out-of-the-box, which can accelerate the development process by reducing the need to build these components from scratch.
  • Customization
    React Toolbox allows for easy customization through CSS Modules, making it easier to tailor the components to match the unique styles of a project.
  • Responsive Design
    The components in React Toolbox are designed to be responsive, helping developers build applications that work well on a variety of screen sizes and devices.

Possible disadvantages of React Toolbox

  • Project Activity
    As of the latest check, React Toolbox might not be as actively maintained as other libraries, which could lead to fewer updates and slower responses to issues.
  • Learning Curve
    For developers unfamiliar with Material Design or CSS Modules, there might be a learning curve associated with using React Toolbox effectively.
  • Dependency on CSS Modules
    Since React Toolbox heavily relies on CSS Modules, it may not be suitable for projects that use different styling methodologies or global stylesheets.
  • Bundle Size
    Incorporating a full suite of components can lead to larger bundle sizes, which might affect the performance of applications if not managed properly.

Angular Material features and specs

  • Consistent Design
    Angular Material provides a set of reusable, well-tested, and accessible UI components based on the Material Design specification, ensuring a consistent look and feel across your application.
  • Pre-built Components
    Offers a wide range of pre-built components including forms, navigation, buttons, and data tables that significantly speed up the development process.
  • Responsiveness
    Components are designed to work smoothly on various screen sizes and resolutions, making it easier to create responsive applications.
  • Integration with Angular
    Tightly integrated with Angular, making it easier to implement and maintain. It also leverages Angularโ€™s features like reactive forms and change detection.
  • Theming and Customization
    Supports extensive theming and customization options, allowing developers to tailor the look and feel of their applications to match brand requirements.
  • Comprehensive Documentation
    Comes with detailed and comprehensive documentation, providing examples and guides to help developers get started quickly.

Possible disadvantages of Angular Material

  • Steep Learning Curve
    Due to the extensive feature set and the intricacies of Material Design, there is a learning curve involved which might be difficult for beginners.
  • Large Bundle Size
    Integrating Angular Material can add to the bundle size of your application, which may affect the loading time and performance, especially for smaller projects.
  • Limited Customizability
    While it offers theming, there are limitations on how much components can be customized compared to creating bespoke solutions.
  • Performance Overhead
    Some components come with additional performance overhead due to their complexity and the use of multiple dependencies.
  • Dependency Management
    You need to manage and maintain additional dependencies that come with Angular Material, which can complicate the build process and dependency management.
  • Opinionated Design
    Being based on Googleโ€™s Material Design, it might impose design choices that might not align with every project's design requirements.

Analysis of React Toolbox

Overall verdict

  • React Toolbox was a solid, well-designed set of React components implementing Google's Material Design, but it is now largely unmaintained and superseded by more actively developed alternatives like MUI (Material-UI).

Why this product is good

  • Clean, modular Material Design components built specifically for React
  • Used CSS Modules for scoped, customizable styling without global conflicts
  • Lightweight and composable, integrating well with modern React workflows at the time
  • Good documentation and a live component playground for exploring usage

Recommended for

  • Developers maintaining legacy projects that already depend on React Toolbox
  • Learning how CSS Modules can be applied to component libraries
  • Small projects needing a straightforward Material Design look (though newer alternatives are preferable)
  • Teams evaluating the evolution of React UI libraries for historical context

React Toolbox videos

No React Toolbox videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Angular Material videos

Angular Material Data Table Tutorial

More videos:

  • Review - Angular Materialโ€™s Trees - Tina Gao
  • Review - Angular Material in practice โ€“ Thomas Burleson

Category Popularity

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User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare React Toolbox and Angular Material

React Toolbox Reviews

6 Best ReactJS based UI Frameworks
Another feather in Google Material Design based library. React Toolbox is a UI library that follows the concepts of Googleโ€™s Material Design and is built on top of some of the trendiest proposals like CSS Modules (written in SASS), Webpack and ES6. The library harmoniously integrates with your Webpack workflow and itโ€™s easily customizable and very flexible.
Source: medium.com

Angular Material Reviews

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

Angular Material might be a bit more popular than React Toolbox. We know about 1 link to it since March 2021 and only 1 link to React Toolbox. 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.

React Toolbox mentions (1)

Angular Material mentions (1)

What are some alternatives?

When comparing React Toolbox and Angular Material, you can also consider the following products

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

Vuetify - Material Component Framework for VueJS 2

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

Buefy - Lightweight UI components for Vue.js based on Bulma

Atlaskit - Atlassian's official UI library for React

Vuesax - Vuesax is a library of Vuejs components that facilitates front-end development and streamlines work...