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React VS Material Design Lite

Compare React VS Material Design Lite and see what are their differences

React logo React

A JavaScript library for building user interfaces

Material Design Lite logo Material Design Lite

Material Design Lite Components in HTML/CSS/JS
  • React Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-19
  • Material Design Lite Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30

React features and specs

  • Component-Based Architecture
    React encourages the creation of reusable UI components, which can be leveraged to build complex user interfaces efficiently. This promotes better code organization and separation of concerns.
  • Virtual DOM
    React uses a virtual DOM to optimize and accelerate the process of updating the browser’s DOM, significantly improving application performance.
  • Strong Community and Ecosystem
    React has a large and active community, which means plenty of third-party libraries, tools, and community support are readily available to assist developers.
  • JSX Syntax
    React’s JSX syntax allows developers to write HTML structures within JavaScript code, making the code more readable and easier to debug.
  • Unidirectional Data Flow
    React promotes a unidirectional data flow, which helps maintain the predictability and ease of debugging, especially for larger applications.
  • Extensive Documentation
    React's official documentation is comprehensive, well-organized, and provides numerous examples and tutorials to help developers get started and advance their skills.

Possible disadvantages of React

  • Steep Learning Curve
    React comes with a steep learning curve for beginners, especially those unfamiliar with JavaScript ES6 and JSX syntax.
  • Boilerplate Code
    Setting up a React project often requires boilerplate code, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming compared to simpler frameworks.
  • Fast-Paced Development
    React and its associated libraries evolve rapidly, necessitating frequent updates and learning new patterns, which can be overwhelming for developers.
  • Complexity in Larger Applications
    As a React application grows in size, managing state and props across components can become complex, sometimes necessitating additional state management libraries like Redux or Context API.
  • SEO Challenges
    React, being a JavaScript library, can present challenges for search engine optimization (SEO) due to Googlebot's limitations in executing JavaScript, although this can be mitigated with server-side rendering (SSR) or static site generation (SSG).

Material Design Lite features and specs

  • Lightweight
    Material Design Lite (MDL) is a lightweight CSS and JavaScript framework that doesn't rely on any external dependencies, making it easy to integrate into projects while ensuring faster load times and better performance.
  • Google's Material Design Aesthetics
    MDL provides components and styles consistent with Google's Material Design guidelines, allowing developers to create visually appealing and modern user interfaces.
  • Easy to Use
    MDL uses straightforward HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, enabling developers, even those with minimal experience, to quickly build and design web applications.
  • Responsive Design
    Material Design Lite is built with mobile-first, responsive design principles, ensuring applications look good on both mobile and desktop devices.
  • Component Rich
    MDL offers a variety of ready-to-use UI components such as buttons, cards, menus, sliders, and more, which can speed up development time.

Possible disadvantages of Material Design Lite

  • Limited Customization
    While MDL offers a set of predefined styles for consistency, it can be challenging to customize beyond the provided options without delving deeply into the CSS.
  • No Longer Actively Maintained
    MDL is no longer actively maintained by Google, meaning there are no updates or improvements, potentially affecting compatibility with modern browsers and devices over time.
  • Basic Components Compared to Other Frameworks
    Compared to comprehensive frameworks like Angular Material or Bootstrap, MDL offers a relatively basic set of UI components, which might not satisfy all project needs.
  • Learning Curve for Advanced Use
    While basic uses of MDL are simple, more advanced implementations might require a deeper understanding of the framework, which can impose a steep learning curve for new developers.
  • Potential Performance Overhead
    MDL's JavaScript components can add unnecessary overhead if not managed carefully, especially in complex applications where performance is critical.

React videos

What Is React?

More videos:

  • Review - NOT Worth Buying? Nike EPIC REACT FLYKNIT 2 vs Epic React REVIEW
  • Review - NIKE REACT INFINITY RUN FLYKNIT REVIEW | The Ginger Runner

Material Design Lite videos

What is Material Design Lite?

More videos:

  • Review - Intro to using Material Design Lite
  • Review - Material Design Lite: All About Android 221

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to React and Material Design Lite)
Javascript UI Libraries
100 100%
0% 0
CSS Framework
0 0%
100% 100
Developer Tools
98 98%
2% 2
Design Tools
0 0%
100% 100

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 and Material Design Lite

React Reviews

Top JavaScript Frameworks in 2025
ReactJS is a JavaScript based UI development library which is developed by Facebook. It is an open-source framework which is widely used by developers for web development. One of the major reasons why React.JS is widely popular is because it uses Virtual DOM. This enables developers to create web applications faster.
Source: solguruz.com
The 20 Best Laravel Alternatives for Web Development
React’s the cool kid on the block, turning heads since Facebook dropped it at our feet. Building dynamic user interfaces feels less like coding, more like crafting with this JavaScript library.
Top 9 best Frameworks for web development
React uses a virtual DOM to optimize the performance of UI updates and follows a one-way data flow for easy tracking of data changes. With its active community and abundance of third-party resources and libraries, React is a solid choice for web development.
Source: www.kiwop.com
9 Best JavaScript Frameworks to Use in 2023
React can be used as a base in the development of single-page or mobile applications. However, React is concerned with rendering data to the DOM, so creating React apps usually requires additional libraries for state management, routing, and interaction with an API.
Source: ninetailed.io
JavaScript: What Are The Most Used Frameworks For This Language?
Some of its top features include server-side rendering, automatic code splitting, client-side routing, built-in CSS support, static site generation and API routes. Overall, Next.JS is a powerful and flexible framework that provides developers with a simple and intuitive way to build complex React applications with ease. It is widely used in the React community and has a...
Source: www.bocasay.com

Material Design Lite Reviews

We have no reviews of Material Design Lite yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, React seems to be a lot more popular than Material Design Lite. While we know about 814 links to React, we've tracked only 4 mentions of Material Design Lite. 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 mentions (814)

  • Indie Hacking with Open Source Tools: Innovating on a Budget
    One inspiring example is a developer building a "Todoist Clone" using a combination of React, Node.js, and MongoDB. The developer tapped into open source libraries and community support to create a highly responsive task management application. This project underscores how indie hackers can achieve rapid development and adaptation with minimal budget – a theme echoed in several indie hacking success stories. - Source: dev.to / 9 days ago
  • Next.js Localization: How to Build a Multilingual Website with Next-Intl
    Next.js is a very popular framework built on top of the React.js library and it provides the best Development Experience for building applications. It offers a bunch of features like:. - Source: dev.to / 22 days ago
  • Web Development Using React Framework
    Explore the official React documentation. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Monorepo Tutorial With Lerna, Storybook & Next.js
    We’ll be creating the components package inside the packages directory. In this monorepo package, we’ll be building React components which will be consumed by our Next.js application (front-end package). - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Migrating from AngularJS to React
    After evaluating our options including upgrading from AngularJS to Angular (the name for every version of Angular 2 and beyond) or migrating and rewriting our application in a completely new JavaScript framework: React. We ultimately chose to go with ReactJS. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
View more

Material Design Lite mentions (4)

  • Where can i find premade components like Navbars, Headers, Cards, Footers, etc.
    Https://getmdl.io/ No specific framework (e.g React, Angular) required. Source: over 2 years ago
  • The React roadmap for beginners you never knew you needed.
    Materialize, Material UI, Material Design Lite. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • How do i use material design in an html page ?
    I would recommend looking into an alternative such as https://getmdl.io/. Source: over 3 years ago
  • For some reason, button is not misaligned in CodePen but when the exact same code is in a normal HTML file, its misaligned and it looks weird
    Sorry if I'm not providing much context, but I'm using Material Design Lite (https://getmdl.io). Strangely, it doesn't work in other online HTML "compilers" like W3Schools TryIt. Source: almost 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing React and Material Design Lite, you can also consider the following products

Vue.js - Reactive Components for Modern Web Interfaces

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

Next.js - A small framework for server-rendered universal JavaScript apps

UIKit - A lightweight and modular front-end framework for developing fast and powerful web interfaces

Svelte - Cybernetically enhanced web apps

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