Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

The Noun Project VS Materialize CSS

Compare The Noun Project VS Materialize CSS and see what are their differences

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The Noun Project logo The Noun Project

Creating, Sharing and Celebrating the World's Visual Language

Materialize CSS logo Materialize CSS

A modern responsive front-end framework based on Material Design
  • The Noun Project Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-07-28
  • Materialize CSS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-14

The Noun Project features and specs

  • Extensive Library
    The Noun Project offers a vast collection of over 3 million icons, covering a wide range of themes and styles, which can be used across various projects.
  • Quality & Consistency
    Icons in The Noun Project are designed by professional designers, ensuring high quality and visual consistency across different icons.
  • Ease of Use
    The platform has a user-friendly interface, making it easy to search, download, and integrate icons into projects.
  • Community Contributions
    The platform allows designers from all over the world to contribute their work, encouraging a diverse range of design styles and cultural representations.
  • Cost-Effective
    Offers both free and premium options, allowing users to access a wide range of icons even with a limited budget.
  • Customizable Icons
    Many icons are customizable in terms of color, size, and format, allowing users to tailor them to their specific needs.

Possible disadvantages of The Noun Project

  • Premium Pricing
    While there are many free icons, access to the entire library and some premium icons may require a subscription which could be costly for some users.
  • Attribution Requirement
    Free icons often require attribution to the designer, which might not be practical or desirable for all users or projects.
  • Limited Uniqueness
    Since the icons are openly available, the same icons might be used by many people, reducing the uniqueness of a project.
  • Overwhelming Choices
    The sheer volume of available icons can be overwhelming, making it difficult for users to find the perfect icon quickly.
  • Dependent on External Platform
    Relying on an external platform means that changes, downtime, or disruptions in The Noun Project's service can affect users' access to icons.
  • Limited Integration
    While there are plugins for some design tools, The Noun Project might not seamlessly integrate with every software or platform designers use.

Materialize CSS features and specs

  • Responsive Design
    Materialize CSS provides a responsive grid system, making it easier to create layouts that work well on various screen sizes and devices.
  • Material Design
    Adheres to Google's Material Design principles, offering a modern and professional look that is consistent across web applications.
  • Component Variety
    Offers a wide range of pre-built components, including forms, buttons, cards, and navigation bars, which helps speed up development.
  • Customization
    Provides options to customize components using Sass, making it flexible for specific design needs.
  • Built-in JavaScript
    Includes built-in JavaScript components like modals, carousels, and tabs, which enhance functionality without requiring additional libraries.

Possible disadvantages of Materialize CSS

  • Learning Curve
    Although it follows Material Design guidelines, there is a learning curve associated with understanding and implementing its various components and classes.
  • File Size
    Including the full library can make your project heavier, affecting load times, especially for users on slower connections.
  • Customization Complexity
    While customizable, deeply customizing or overriding default styles can sometimes be complicated and time-consuming.
  • Dependency on jQuery
    Some components still rely on jQuery, adding to the library size and potentially conflicting with modern JavaScript practices.
  • Community Support
    Compared to larger frameworks like Bootstrap, Materialize CSS has a smaller community, which can result in fewer third-party resources and plugins.

Analysis of The Noun Project

Overall verdict

  • Yes, The Noun Project is generally considered a valuable resource for designers, educators, and other professionals who require high-quality icons. Its extensive collection and commitment to diversity and accessibility make it a standout platform.

Why this product is good

  • The Noun Project is highly regarded for its vast and diverse library of icons and symbols that are designed by a global community of designers. It provides users with a wide array of creative options, supports multiple file formats, and offers both free and premium subscription plans. The platform is user-friendly, making it easy to search and find the perfect icons for a wide range of projects. It also emphasizes accessibility and inclusivity by offering culturally diverse representations in its iconography.

Recommended for

  • graphic designers looking for high-quality icons
  • educators in need of visual aids for presentations
  • web developers in search of icons for user interfaces
  • anyone needing icons for social media posts or print materials
  • organizations aiming to find culturally diverse iconography

Analysis of Materialize CSS

Overall verdict

  • Materialize CSS is a good choice if you're looking for a framework that emphasizes Material Design and comes with a sleek, modern interface. It's particularly useful for developers who want to quickly integrate Google's design philosophy without delving into custom styling or layout creation.

Why this product is good

  • Materialize CSS is a front-end framework based on Material Design principles developed by Google. It provides a comprehensive set of UI components that help developers create visually appealing and responsive web applications quickly. The framework includes a variety of pre-styled components like buttons, forms, cards, and much more, which adhere to the Material Design guidelines. This consistency in design components helps ensure a cohesive and professional look across web applications. Additionally, it simplifies responsive design with a grid system that's easy to implement, and it comes with excellent documentation and a supportive community.

Recommended for

    Materialize CSS is recommended for teams and developers who prefer Google's Material Design aesthetic, are building applications with a focus on rapid UI development, and value consistency and ease of use. It's also great for projects where a pre-existing UI library speeds up the development process, such as prototypes, admin dashboards, or smaller web applications. However, for highly customized UI components or non-Material Design projects, other frameworks might be more suitable.

The Noun Project videos

The Noun Project review: using icons in your slides - The Good, the Bad and the Tip

More videos:

  • Review - The Noun Project: Brian's Go-To Catalog of Over 1 Million Icons!

Materialize CSS videos

Build A Travel Agency Theme With Materialize CSS 1.0.0

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to The Noun Project and Materialize CSS)
Web Icons
100 100%
0% 0
Design Tools
23 23%
77% 77
Vector Icons
100 100%
0% 0
Developer 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 The Noun Project and Materialize CSS

The Noun Project Reviews

12 Best Free FontAwesome Alternatives in 2023 
The Noun Project is another excellent pack of font icons that you can go for. This pack contains icons for practically everything under the sun. You can find more than 5 million curated icons in this pack that have been created by a global and culturally diverse community. All these icons are royalty-free, and you can get them easily in your workflow.
Source: lineicons.com
7 Best Free Icon Libraries
The Noun Project's web icons library offers integrations with Adobe, Mac, Office, and Google apps. This might make you assume spending for a yearly plan. Remember, you can download and use it for free and without attribution.
Source: www.atatus.com
10 Best Fontello Alternatives 2021
Designers and photographers from all walks of life can submit their original designs and images on The Noun Project, under the Creative Commons Zero license. This way, anyone can freely use these designs or photos without restrictions or the need for attributions.

Materialize CSS Reviews

15 Top Bootstrap Alternatives For Frontend Developers in 2024
Material Design is a design language that combines classic principles of successful design with innovation and technology. One of the downsides of Materialize is that it does not support older versions of web browsers, and sometimes it does not handle certain nestings of components properly, resulting in an odd appearance.
Source: coursesity.com
9 Best Bootstrap Alternatives | Best Frontend Frameworks [2024]
Materialize is a modern responsive front-end framework based on the Material Design principles of Google. Material design is a design language created by Google, which combines traditional design methods with innovations and technology.
Source: hackr.io
Top 10 Best CSS Frameworks for Front-End Developers in 2022
Created by Google in 2014, Materialize is a responsive UI framework for websites and Android apps. It provides many ready-to-use components, classes, and starter templates. It is compatible with Sass and has a responsive layout based on Bootstrap’s 12-column grid format. The best part? Its extensive color palettes. So, if you want to work with Material Design (Google’s...
Source: hackr.io
15 Best CSS Frameworks: Professional Bootstrap and Foundation Alternatives
It’s specifically designed to help you develop faster using a standard template and customizable components. As the name suggests, Materialize is based on the basic principles of Material Design.
10 of the Best Bootstrap Alternatives
Materialize is a Design-inspired front-end framework that offers everything you need to create beautiful websites and apps. It includes a responsive grid system, CSS components, and animation libraries. Materialize is also easy to use and customizable, making it the perfect choice for any project. Furthermore, a single basic responsive framework across all phases minimizes...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, The Noun Project should be more popular than Materialize CSS. It has been mentiond 143 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.

The Noun Project mentions (143)

  • IcôNES
    If you’re looking for icons http://thenounproject.com (no affiliation) has a huge collection. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • The Best 100 Free UI/UX Resources for Every Designer & Developer
    The Noun Project Thenounproject.com Free icons with attribution (CC license). - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • How to make mix-blend-mode round to black or white only
    Relying on backdrop-filter has one issue: even if you have a transparent background behind your blending element, the rectangle behind it will look black or white too. This is fine for rectangular elements such as the simple scroller inside the CodePen example, but not for complex shapes such as the planet logo from the Noun Project shown in the same example. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Show HN: LogoMVP – Generate quick, professional logos for your MVP
    Hey, great work! You could easily add the Bootstrap Icons library to this. And then perhaps the Noun Project. https://icons.getbootstrap.com/ https://thenounproject.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Useful Websites for Cheat Sheets and Programming Resources
    Content: The Noun Project offers a vast collection of icons that can be used in various projects, providing a wide range of icons for different purposes. Benefits: Access to high-quality icons for use in design and development projects, enhancing visual communication and design. Link: https://thenounproject.com/. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
View more

Materialize CSS mentions (26)

  • Top 5 Best CSS Frameworks for Responsive Web Design in 2024
    Materialize is a modern CSS framework based on Google’s Material Design. It was created and designed by Google to provide a unified and consistent user interface across all its products. Materialize is focused on user experience as it integrates animations and components to provide feedback to users. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Front-end Framework: Comparing Bootstrap, Foundation and Materialize
    Materialize was created by a team of developers at Google, inspired by the principles of Material Design. Material Design is a design language developed by Google that emphasizes tactile surfaces, realistic lighting, and bold, graphic interfaces. Materialize aims to bring these principles to web development by providing a framework with ready-to-use components and styles based on Material Design. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Took a web development job without much experience, am I doomed?
    If you wanna make it look nice use materialize css works great with Django templates. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Best 3 Bootstrap Alternatives
    You can also visit the Materialize website and GitHub repository which currently has garnered over 38k likes and has been forked over 4k times by developers. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • All About Hacktober Fest 2022 You Need To Know
    This repository consists of files required to deploy a Web App or PWA created with Materialize Css. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing The Noun Project and Materialize CSS, you can also consider the following products

Flaticon - A database of free vector icons.

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

Icons8 - Free app for Mac & Windows already containing 39,800 icons. Allows to search and import icons…

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

Font Awesome - Font Awesome makes it easy to add vector icons and social logos to your website. And version 5 is redesigned and built from the ground up!

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