Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

styled-components VS Angular Material

Compare styled-components VS Angular Material and see what are their differences

styled-components logo styled-components

styled-components is a visual primitive for the component age that also helps the user to use the ES6 and CSS to style apps.

Angular Material logo Angular Material

Angular Material is both a UI Component framework and a reference implementation of Google's Material Design Specification.
  • styled-components Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-27
  • Angular Material Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-01-24

styled-components features and specs

  • Component-Scoped Styling
    Styles are encapsulated within components, ensuring that styles do not leak or conflict with other parts of the application.
  • Dynamic Styling
    Enables dynamic styling with the help of JavaScript variables and props, allowing for highly customizable components.
  • CSS Syntax
    Allows developers to write actual CSS code within JavaScript, making it easier for those familiar with CSS to adapt.
  • Automatic Vendor Prefixing
    Automatically adds vendor prefixes to CSS properties, ensuring cross-browser compatibility without additional configuration.
  • Theming Support
    Provides a built-in theming solution, making it easier to implement and switch between different themes in the application.
  • Server-Side Rendering
    Supports server-side rendering, improving initial page load times and SEO.

Possible disadvantages of styled-components

  • Bundle Size
    Styled-components can add to the overall bundle size, potentially affecting performance, especially in large projects.
  • Learning Curve
    Requires developers to learn the styled-components library and its API, which can be a hurdle for new team members or those unfamiliar with CSS-in-JS.
  • Performance Overhead
    The runtime cost of parsing and injecting styles can impact performance, particularly in larger applications or with frequent style changes.
  • Tooling and Ecosystem
    While improving, the ecosystem around styled-components (e.g., linting, debugging) is not as mature as traditional CSS or CSS preprocessor tools.
  • CSS-in-JS Limitations
    Some CSS features, like advanced selectors or cascading, may be more cumbersome or less intuitive to implement compared to traditional CSS approaches.

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 styled-components

Overall verdict

  • Styled-components is considered a good choice for many React projects, especially for large applications where modularity and maintainability of styles are important. It has a strong community, extensive documentation, and is widely adopted in the industry.

Why this product is good

  • Styled-components is a popular library for styling React applications. It allows developers to write CSS-in-JS, which means that styles are written in JavaScript and scoped to individual components. This approach offers several benefits, such as easier style management, dynamic styling capabilities, and the ability to leverage JavaScript's full power for styles. Styled-components also supports theming, making it easier to develop consistent design systems.

Recommended for

  • Developers looking to implement a consistent design system with theming capabilities
  • Large-scale React applications where component-based styling is essential
  • Projects that require dynamic styling based on props or state
  • Teams familiar with or willing to adopt a CSS-in-JS approach

styled-components videos

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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

0-100% (relative to styled-components and Angular Material)
Developer Tools
79 79%
21% 21
Development Tools
54 54%
46% 46
Design Tools
85 85%
15% 15
Javascript UI Libraries
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, styled-components seems to be a lot more popular than Angular Material. While we know about 174 links to styled-components, we've tracked only 1 mention of Angular Material. 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.

styled-components mentions (174)

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Angular Material mentions (1)

What are some alternatives?

When comparing styled-components and Angular Material, you can also consider the following products

Tailwind CSS - A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.

Vuetify - Material Component Framework for VueJS 2

Sass - Syntatically Awesome Style Sheets

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

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

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