Bootstrap vs Material Design Lite

Overview

Bootstrap

Stacks57.4K

Followers13.2K

Votes7.7K

GitHub Stars173.6K

Forks79.2K

Material Design Lite

Stacks697

Followers394

Votes62

GitHub Stars32.2K

Forks5.0K

Bootstrap vs Material Design Lite: What are the differences?

Developers describe Bootstrap as "Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and JS for popular UI components and interactions". Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web. On the other hand, Material Design Lite is detailed as "Material Design Lite Components in HTML/CSS/JS". Material Design Lite (MDL) lets you add a Material Design look and feel to your static content websites. It doesn't rely on any JavaScript frameworks or libraries. Optimized for cross-device use, gracefully degrades in older browsers, and offers an experience that is accessible from the get-go.

Bootstrap and Material Design Lite can be categorized as "Front-End Frameworks" tools.

Some of the features offered by Bootstrap are:

Preprocessors: Bootstrap ships with vanilla CSS, but its source code utilizes the two most popular CSS preprocessors, Less and Sass. Quickly get started with precompiled CSS or build on the source.
One framework, every device: Bootstrap easily and efficiently scales your websites and applications with a single code base, from phones to tablets to desktops with CSS media queries.
Full of features: With Bootstrap, you get extensive and beautiful documentation for common HTML elements, dozens of custom HTML and CSS components, and awesome jQuery plugins.

On the other hand, Material Design Lite provides the following key features:

Blog Template
Dashboard Template
Text Heavy Webpage Template

"Responsiveness" is the top reason why over 1544 developers like Bootstrap, while over 23 developers mention "Material Design straight from the original creators" as the leading cause for choosing Material Design Lite.

Bootstrap and Material Design Lite are both open source tools. It seems that Bootstrap with 134K GitHub stars and 66K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Material Design Lite with 31.3K GitHub stars and 5.32K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Bootstrap has a broader approval, being mentioned in 7046 company stacks & 1115 developers stacks; compared to Material Design Lite, which is listed in 9 company stacks and 26 developer stacks.

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Advice on Bootstrap, Material Design Lite

Bridget

Full Stack Developer at Bridget Sarah

May 29, 2020

Decided

I do prefer to write things from scratch however when it came to wanting to jump-start the frontend, I found that it was taking me a lot longer hence why needing to use something very fast.

Bootstrap was the boom when it came out, I didn't like it, to be honest, set in its way and a pain to over-ride and in addition, you can tell from a distance if you're using boostrap and as everything looks the same.

I came across Tailwind CSS as I wanted more dynamic features, you could say, I've been now doing it for a few days and I love it a lot. I've been practising with the full stack part installed but I an't we wait until I do a new project, and I'll e able to select exactly what I want. Much faster.

681k views681k

Comments

Daniel

Frontend Developer at atSistemas

Jun 10, 2020

Needs adviceon

New Relic

Next.js

React

I'm building, from scratch, a webapp. It's going to be a dashboard to check on our apps in New Relic and update the Apdex from the webapp. I have just chosen Next.js as our framework because we use React already, and after going through the tutorial, I just loved the latest changes they have implemented.

But we have to decide on a CSS framework for the UI. I'm partial to Bulma because I love that it's all about CSS (and you can use SCSS from the start), that it's rather lightweight and that it doesn't come with JavaScript clutter. One of the things I hate about Bootstrap is that you depend on jQuery to use the JavaScript part. My boss loves UIkIt, but when I've used it in the past, I didn't like it.

What do you think we should use? Maybe you have another suggestion?

1.07M views1.07M

Comments

Kexin

Mar 4, 2021

Decided

I replaced Bootstrap with Material-UI during the front-end UI development, because Material-UI adopts a component-based importing style, making it suit well in a "React programming style". This makes me comfortable when programming because I can treat importing UI components as other React components I define.

281k views281k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Bootstrap	Material Design Lite
Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.	Material Design Lite (MDL) lets you add a Material Design look and feel to your static content websites. It doesn't rely on any JavaScript frameworks or libraries. Optimized for cross-device use, gracefully degrades in older browsers, and offers an experience that is accessible from the get-go.
Preprocessors: Bootstrap ships with vanilla CSS, but its source code utilizes the two most popular CSS preprocessors, Less and Sass. Quickly get started with precompiled CSS or build on the source.;One framework, every device: Bootstrap easily and efficiently scales your websites and applications with a single code base, from phones to tablets to desktops with CSS media queries.;Full of features: With Bootstrap, you get extensive and beautiful documentation for common HTML elements, dozens of custom HTML and CSS components, and awesome jQuery plugins.	Blog template;Dashboard template;Text heavy webpage template; Stand alone article template;
Statistics
GitHub Stars 173.6K	GitHub Stars 32.2K
GitHub Forks 79.2K	GitHub Forks 5.0K
Stacks 57.4K	Stacks 697
Followers 13.2K	Followers 394
Votes 7.7K	Votes 62
Pros & Cons
Pros 1582 Responsiveness 1193 UI components 943 Consistent 779 Great docs 677 Flexible Cons 26 Javascript is tied to jquery 16 Every site uses the defaults 15 Grid system break points aren't ideal 14 Too much heavy decoration in default look 8 Verbose styles	Pros 23 Material Design straight from the original creators 11 Based on bem philosophy 9 Nice animations 7 SCSS 5 Simple Material Design

What are some alternatives to Bootstrap, Material Design Lite?

Foundation

Foundation is the most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world. You can quickly prototype and build sites or apps that work on any kind of device with Foundation, which includes layout constructs (like a fully responsive grid), elements and best practices.

Semantic UI

Semantic empowers designers and developers by creating a shared vocabulary for UI.

Materialize

A CSS Framework based on material design.

Material Design for Angular

Material Design is a specification for a unified system of visual, motion, and interaction design that adapts across different devices. Our goal is to deliver a lean, lightweight set of AngularJS-native UI elements that implement the material design system for use in Angular SPAs.

Material-UI

Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design.

Blazor

Blazor is a .NET web framework that runs in any browser. You author Blazor apps using C#/Razor and HTML.

Quasar Framework

Build responsive Single Page Apps, SSR Apps, PWAs, Hybrid Mobile Apps and Electron Apps, all using the same codebase!, powered with Vue.

Nuxt.js

Nuxt.js presets all the configuration needed to make your development of a Vue.js application enjoyable. You can use Nuxt.js for SSR, SPA, Static Generated, PWA and more.

UIkIt

UIkit gives you a comprehensive collection of HTML, CSS, and JS components which is simple to use, easy to customize and extendable.

Tailwind CSS

Tailwind is different from frameworks like Bootstrap, Foundation, or Bulma in that it's not a UI kit. It doesn't have a default theme, and there are no build-in UI components. It comes with a menu of predesigned widgets to build your site with, but doesn't impose design decisions that are difficult to undo.