Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Skeleton CSS VS Material UI

Compare Skeleton CSS VS Material UI and see what are their differences

Skeleton CSS logo Skeleton CSS

A Beautiful Boilerplate for Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Development

Material UI logo Material UI

A CSS Framework and a Set of React Components that Implement Google's Material Design
  • Skeleton CSS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30
  • Material UI Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-24

Skeleton CSS features and specs

  • Lightweight
    Skeleton CSS is extremely lightweight, with a file size of just about 400 lines of code, making it quick to load and easy to manage compared to bulkier frameworks.
  • Simplicity
    Its simplicity makes it easy to learn and implement, which is ideal for beginners or for small projects that don't require complex styling.
  • Responsive Grid
    Skeleton CSS includes a responsive grid system, which helps in creating responsive layouts that easily adjust to various screen sizes.
  • Clean Design
    Skeleton offers a clean and minimal design by default, providing a good starting point for further customization without unnecessary bloat.

Possible disadvantages of Skeleton CSS

  • Limited Components
    Skeleton CSS lacks the range of components available in larger frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation, making it less flexible for larger or more complex projects.
  • Customization
    While its simplicity is an advantage, it also means less out-of-the-box customization options compared to more comprehensive frameworks.
  • Community and Support
    Skeleton CSS has a smaller community and fewer resources or plugins available, meaning less peer and developer support is accessible compared to more popular frameworks.
  • Scalability
    It is less suited for large-scale applications where a more feature-rich and modular framework might be necessary to manage complex requirements.

Material UI features and specs

  • Comprehensive Component Library
    Material UI offers a wide range of pre-built components that adhere to Google's Material Design guidelines, making it easier to build aesthetically pleasing user interfaces quickly.
  • Customizability
    Material UI components are highly customizable. Developers can easily adjust styles, themes, and behaviors to match specific project requirements.
  • Active Community and Support
    Material UI has a large and active community of developers. This means better support, frequent updates, and a wealth of resources like tutorials and documentation.
  • Improved Productivity
    The pre-built components and templates can greatly reduce the time and effort required to develop UI elements, thereby increasing development productivity.
  • Cross-Browser Compatibility
    Designed to work across multiple browsers, Material UI ensures a consistent user experience regardless of the platform.
  • Accessibility
    Material UI includes features that improve accessibility, conforming to WCAG guidelines to create more inclusive web applications.

Analysis of Skeleton CSS

Overall verdict

  • Skeleton CSS is a good choice for developers seeking a minimalist framework that provides essential styling without unnecessary complexity. It's particularly beneficial for small projects or when you need to rapidly prototype designs. However, for larger projects with extensive UI component requirements, a more comprehensive framework might be more suitable.

Why this product is good

  • Skeleton CSS is a lightweight CSS framework designed for simplicity and ease of use. It provides a flexible grid system and basic styles for common HTML elements, making it ideal for starting projects quickly without the overhead of more complex frameworks. Its minimalistic approach ensures that developers have a clean slate to work from, without being overwhelmed by pre-designed components or themes. Additionally, its simplicity makes it easy to learn and modify, which is great for developers who prefer more control over their project's appearance.

Recommended for

    Skeleton CSS is recommended for developers who appreciate a minimalist approach, those working on small to medium-sized projects, designers who want a lightweight starting point without a steep learning curve, and anyone looking to quickly prototype ideas without being bogged down by extensive styling rules or pre-existing themes.

Analysis of Material UI

Overall verdict

  • Material UI is considered a strong choice for developers who want to create applications with a modern and clean look, leveraging Google's Material Design principles. Its rich set of components and strong community support make it a reliable option for both small and large projects.

Why this product is good

  • Material UI (MUI) is a widely-used React component library that implements Google's Material Design guidelines, providing a consistent and modern aesthetic for web applications.
  • It offers a comprehensive set of customizable components, making it easier for developers to build responsive and visually appealing UIs.
  • MUI is well-documented and has a large community, which means plenty of third-party resources, tutorials, and support are available.
  • The library is continuously updated and maintained, ensuring compatibility with the latest versions of React and web standards.

Recommended for

  • Developers looking for a ready-to-use set of components adhering to Material Design, without sacrificing flexibility.
  • Projects requiring a quick development turnaround where a polished and professional UI is needed.
  • Teams that prefer not to spend extensive time on UI design and implementation while still achieving a high-quality look.

Skeleton CSS videos

Skeleton Anatomy and Physiology Review Bones 01

More videos:

  • Review - skeleton anatomy easy review for practical exam bones and structures
  • Review - Unboxing and Review Head Unit Skeleton SKT 8197 Universal

Material UI videos

Getting Started With Material-UI For React (Material Design for React)

More videos:

  • Review - Code Review: react-material-ui-datatable

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Skeleton CSS and Material UI)
CSS Framework
42 42%
58% 58
Design Tools
21 21%
79% 79
Developer Tools
19 19%
81% 81
Development Tools
19 19%
81% 81

User comments

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Reviews

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

Skeleton CSS Reviews

22 Best Bootstrap Alternatives & What Each Is Best For
Balance Functionality and Performance: High functionality might come with the cost of performance. For example, MUI is exceptional for material design, but it might be heavier compared to lighter frameworks like Skeleton. Strive for a balance between the functionality you need and the performance you can afford to sacrifice.
Source: thectoclub.com
15 Top Bootstrap Alternatives For Frontend Developers in 2024
However, it's important to note that Skeleton lacks active maintenance, posing a significant drawback. Additionally, the security of the Skeleton website is currently questionable. Furthermore, its use of outdated markup for layout, such as floats and clear fixes, may present compatibility issues in modern web development environments.
Source: coursesity.com
9 Best Bootstrap Alternatives | Best Frontend Frameworks [2024]
Skeleton is a lightweight CSS framework, majorly popular for its 12-column fluid grid, which consists of rows and columns, similar to other CSS grids. The newer version of Skeleton adopts a mobile-first approach, which enables the layout to be the center of attraction, irrespective of the screen size. Being lightweight, Skeleton can speed up the front-end development process.
Source: hackr.io
Top 10 Best CSS Frameworks for Front-End Developers in 2022
As the name suggests, the Skeleton is a light framework. If your website is small and straightforward, Skeleton provides a necessary collection of CSS elements to speed up your development. It provides lightly styled forms, tabs, buttons, etc. You get a responsive grid, Vanilla CSS, and media queries for your project without the larger frameworks' complexities. It is a great...
Source: hackr.io
15 Best CSS Frameworks: Professional Bootstrap and Foundation Alternatives
As a two-in-one solution, Skeleton quickly made it on our list. This is both a boilerplate and a comprehensive CSS framework. We enjoyed customizing its 12-column grid during our testing, and we found out that it has virtually no learning curve.

Material UI Reviews

  1. oliviertassinari

15 Top Bootstrap Alternatives For Frontend Developers in 2024
One of the highlighting features of this framework like Bootstrap is that it is based on Google's Material Design, offering a variety of reusable components that can be incorporated as needed. A major drawback of Material UI is its limitation to only React-based components. Additionally, it uses CSS-in-JS (a technique of writing CSS styling in JavaScript), which may not be...
Source: coursesity.com
React UI Components Libraries: Our Top Picks for 2023
Material-UI (MUI) is a fully loaded UI component library that offers a comprehensive set of UI tools to create and deploy new features at speed. It is one of the most powerful and popular UI component libraries out there with over 3.2 million downloads on npm a week, 78k stars on GitHub, 17k+ followers on Twitter, and 2.4k+ open-source contributors.
Source: kinsta.com
Top React component libraries (2021 edition)
For support, there’s plenty of free options like the Material-UI community, Stack Overflow, and GitHub. Material points technical questions to Stack Overflow, where more than 12.5k questions have been posted. GitHub is used exclusively as a bugs and feature requests tracker. On the paid side, Material-UI suggests purchasing a Tidelift subscription which offers “flexibility...
Source: retool.com
Comparing popular React component libraries
Unlike Ant Design, Material-UI offers built-in methods to style components. makeStyles() is useful, especially when your code starts to get big; it helps you find the element to style more quickly and makes the code more readable. The downside is that readability may degrade as a component grows. But overall, Material-UI is a strong, highly customizable library.
6 Best ReactJS based UI Frameworks
MaterialUI is a set of React Components that Implement the Google’s Material Design Guidelines. When it comes to predefined components especially UI, one important thing we need to find is how many UI widgets are available and whether these can be customized with configurations. Material-UI has all components that you need and it is very configurable with predefined color...
Source: medium.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Material UI should be more popular than Skeleton CSS. It has been mentiond 75 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.

Skeleton CSS mentions (17)

  • Concrete.css
    I had been using similar projects such as skeleton[0] and milligram[1] for small experiments such as repfl[2], and wanted to create something similar that I would find aesthetically pleasing and that would fit in as little space as possible. The current version of concrete.css is less than 1kb minzipped! [0] http://getskeleton.com/ [1] https://milligram.io/ [2] https://repfl.ch/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Ask HN: How to build online calculator website?
    Here's my personal goto: Find some minimal CSS framework. My preference is Skeleton [0] or Bootstrap [1]. The key is just finding something minimal that works without too much fuss. Personally, I rather have a minimal framework provide 'responsiveness' so I don't have to worry about it but I also want it to get out of the way of anything I do. Use JQuery [2]. Don't rely on CSS for animations or interactivity. In... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • Suggest minimal CSS framework
    I've used http://getskeleton.com/ in the past. I think it's probably just what you're looking for. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Pdf generated from form
    I use an older css library called skeleton. It’s a utility framework that came out before css grid. It has a really nice and easy to use grid system built without css-grid. I had to get rid of the media queries to get it work but it’s been great otherwise! Source: over 2 years ago
  • what do you do when coding for responsive?
    I use a minified and customised simple boilerplate / grid system based in skeleton (http://getskeleton.com/). It has no mediaqueries predefined, but the rules for each screen resolution are stated. I start making the website for computer screen formats (large resolutions) and end adapting up the design to phone screens. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

Material UI mentions (75)

  • Building Forms with zod and react-hook-form
    Material UI: Component library to style our form input fields. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Getting started with NextUI and Next.js
    These UI components and elements usually include Button, Navbar, Tooltip, Tab components, and more. Many UI libraries exist, including React Bootstrap, built on the popular Bootstrap CSS library, and Material-UI, one of the most popular UI component libraries for React. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Comparing React Component Libraries
    Material UI, the undisputed heavyweight champion on this list, was created according to Google’s Material Design guidelines. Launched in 2014, it currently has 71K stars, 23.9K forks, 2284 contributors, and 687K users on GitHub, indicating lots of active maintainers and a vibrant community. A large community also means that bugs are fixed faster. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • How to overwrite Material UI tooltip inline styles?
    I am currently developing a React component that leverages the Material UI Tooltip component. Within my component, I need to manually re-position the Mui Tooltip via the root popper element (MuiTooltip-popper). Source: about 3 years ago
  • Get value of MenuItem material ui
    I'm using Material UI for Menu and Menu Item.I'm trying to get the value of a menu item, but it doesn't work. Source: about 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Skeleton CSS and Material UI, you can also consider the following products

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

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

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

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

Chakra UI - Simple, modular and accessible UI components for your React applications.

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