StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Front End Frameworks
  5. Foundation vs Material Design

Foundation vs Material Design

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Foundation
Foundation
Stacks1.2K
Followers1.2K
Votes740
Material Design
Material Design
Stacks594
Followers890
Votes14

Foundation vs Material Design: What are the differences?

  1. Grid System: Foundation uses a customizable grid system that allows for different column arrangements, offsets, and alignments, while Material Design follows a 12-column grid system with fixed gutters and margins, providing a more structured layout.
  2. Components: Foundation offers a wide range of pre-designed components like buttons, navigation bars, and forms, which can be easily customized, whereas Material Design focuses on consistent design principles like depth, movement, and material surfaces to create a cohesive user experience.
  3. Styling: Foundation provides a more flexible and customizable styling approach with various SASS variables and mixins, allowing for extensive theme customization, while Material Design follows strict guidelines regarding color palettes, typography, and animations for a consistent visual language across different platforms.
  4. Interactivity: Foundation emphasizes interactions through its JavaScript plugins and animations, offering a variety of dynamic UI elements, whereas Material Design focuses on motion design by using transitions, animations, and touch feedback to enhance user experience and to create a sense of depth.
  5. Compatibility: Foundation is designed to be responsive and works well across different devices and screen sizes, with a mobile-first approach, while Material Design is specifically optimized for Google's platforms, like Android, providing a seamless experience within the Google ecosystem.
  6. Community Support: Foundation has a strong community backing with regular updates, support forums, and documentation, making it easier for developers to find resources and resolve issues, whereas Material Design, being a Google framework, offers extensive documentation and resources specific to its guidelines.

In Summary, Foundation and Material Design differ in their grid systems, components, styling approaches, interactivity features, compatibility with platforms, and community support.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Foundation, Material Design

Ashish
Ashish

Sr. UI Associate at Daffodil Software

Dec 29, 2020

Needs adviceonBootstrapBootstrapMaterial DesignMaterial DesignTailwind CSSTailwind CSS

I am a bit confused when to choose Bootstrap vs Material Design or Tailwind CSS, and why? I mean, in which kind of projects we can work with bootstrap/Material/Tailwind CSS? If the design is made up on the grid, we prefer bootstrap, and if flat design, then material design. Similarly, when do we choose tailwind CSS?

Any suggestion would be appreciated?

735k views735k
Comments
Raj
Raj

Jan 3, 2021

Review

Hi Ashish,

If you need minimal work to be done from your end and like most of the components / design available out of the box - go with Bootstrap. This is the oldest and has the widest adoption and a whole range of components built out by others.

If you like Material design, this is a good choice too. Please note that Bootstrap also has a Material theme, though it is not as native.

Both of these above frameworks are bulky and has more than what you may need.

If you like to build micro-components in a elegant way, TailwindCSS is the way to go.

307k views307k
Comments
Ryan
Ryan

Mar 11, 2021

Decided

Ant Design offers the most components with JS and CSS taken care of. They look clean, professional, and usable.

We paired this with Bulma for making the containers and structure reactive. Bulma (for react) make it easy to just add a section, container, and content and have it work on all platforms.

We also use Geist UI, though not recognized by Stack share, for its simple and modern feel. Highly recommend Geist if you want modern components for complicated UI's

220k views220k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Foundation
Foundation
Material Design
Material Design

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.

Material Design is a unified system that combines theory, resources, and tools for crafting digital experiences.

Semantic: Everything is semantic. You can have the cleanest markup without sacrificing the utility and speed of Foundation.;Mobile First: You can build for small devices first. Then, as devices get larger and larger, layer in more complexity for a complete responsive design.;Customizable: You can customize your build to include or remove certain elements, as well as define the size of columns, colors, font size and more.;Professional: Millions of designers and developers depend on Foundation. Now we have business support, training and consulting to help grow your product or service.
-
Statistics
Stacks
1.2K
Stacks
594
Followers
1.2K
Followers
890
Votes
740
Votes
14
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 160
    Responsive grid
  • 93
    Mobile first
  • 80
    Open source
  • 75
    Semantic
  • 72
    Customizable
Cons
  • 5
    Requires jQuery
  • 4
    Awful site
Pros
  • 5
    They really set a new bar in design
  • 4
    An intuitive design
  • 3
    Simply, And Beautiful
  • 2
    Many great libraries
  • 0
    Composants
Cons
  • 2
    Sometimes, it can hang the browser

What are some alternatives to Foundation, Material Design?

Bootstrap

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.

Semantic UI

Semantic UI

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

Materialize

Materialize

A CSS Framework based on material design.

Material Design for Angular

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

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

Blazor

Blazor

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

Quasar Framework

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

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

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 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.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase