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styled-components VS Material React Table

Compare styled-components VS Material React Table 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.

Material React Table logo Material React Table

Material React Table, a fully featured Material UI V5 implementation of TanStack React Table V8. Written from the ground up in TypeScript.
  • styled-components Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-27
  • Material React Table Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-03

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.

Material React Table features and specs

  • Easy Integration
    Material React Table can be easily integrated with React applications, especially those already using Material-UI, providing a consistent design and seamless component usage.
  • Customizable Styling
    Offers a high degree of customization through Material-UI's theming and styling capabilities, allowing developers to tailor the table's appearance to match their application's look and feel.
  • Rich Feature Set
    Includes a variety of built-in features like pagination, sorting, filtering, and selection, reducing the need for additional libraries and custom development.
  • Component Modularity
    The table is composed of modular components, allowing developers to use specific parts of the table as needed and providing flexibility in implementation.
  • Responsive Design
    Designed to be responsive out of the box, which ensures it works well on different screen sizes and devices without additional configuration.

Possible disadvantages of Material React Table

  • Learning Curve
    Although powerful, the library may require a learning curve for those unfamiliar with Material-UI or its paradigms, potentially increasing development time for new users.
  • Performance Overhead
    For applications that do not require all of its features, Material React Table may introduce unnecessary overhead, potentially affecting performance.
  • Dependency on Material-UI
    It relies on Material-UI, which may add a dependency that some developers prefer to avoid if they are using a different design framework or no framework at all.
  • Limited Advanced Customization
    While it offers customization, truly advanced use cases or uncommon layout requirements might still necessitate additional custom development beyond what is easily configurable.
  • Version Compatibility
    Compatibility with different versions of React and Material-UI might sometimes be a challenge, requiring caution during updates and upgrades to ensure everything works harmoniously.

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to styled-components and Material React Table)
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Data Grid
0 0%
100% 100
Design Tools
95 95%
5% 5
React Components
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 styled-components and Material React Table

styled-components Reviews

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Material React Table Reviews

The Best React Data Grid/Table Libraries with Material Design in 2023 - MRT Blog
The final library on this list is Material React Table. This is a relatively new library that was first released in September 2022. Unlike the two previously mentioned libraries, Material React Table is 100% free to use with the MIT license. It is also built directly on top of Material UI v5 and exclusively uses Material UI components under the hood, so it will fit right in...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, styled-components seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 174 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.

styled-components mentions (174)

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Material React Table mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Material React Table yet. Tracking of Material React Table recommendations started around Jun 2023.

What are some alternatives?

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

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

TanStack Table - Headless UI for building powerful tables & datagrids with TS/JS, React, Solid, Svelte and Vue

Sass - Syntatically Awesome Style Sheets

Tablefront - Tablefront is a premium, zeroโ€‘configuration React DataTable with table, grid, and masonry layouts. Built on TanStack Table with TypeScript and composable UI.

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

AG Grid - The best HTML5 datagrid in the world