Foundation vs Material Design Lite

Foundation vs Material Design Lite: What are the differences?

Developers describe Foundation as "The most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world". 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. 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.

Foundation and Material Design Lite can be primarily classified as "Front-End Frameworks" tools.

Some of the features offered by Foundation are:

• 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.

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

• Blog Template
• Dashboard Template
• Text Heavy Webpage Template

"Responsive grid" is the primary reason why developers consider Foundation over the competitors, whereas "Material Design straight from the original creators" was stated as the key factor in picking Material Design Lite.

Foundation and Material Design Lite are both open source tools. It seems that Material Design Lite with 31.3K GitHub stars and 5.32K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Foundation with 28.2K GitHub stars and 5.77K GitHub forks.

Docker, HotelTonight, and OpenTable are some of the popular companies that use Foundation, whereas Material Design Lite is used by Google, Troopers, and Boxme. Foundation has a broader approval, being mentioned in 653 company stacks & 77 developers stacks; compared to Material Design Lite, which is listed in 9 company stacks and 26 developer stacks.