What is Material Design and what are its top alternatives?
Material Design is a design language developed by Google that aims to create a consistent user experience across all platforms and devices. It is characterized by its use of bold colors, responsive animations, and a clean layout. Key features of Material Design include a focus on user interactions, the use of grid-based layouts, and customizable themes. However, some limitations of Material Design include the fact that it may not always work well with older devices and that it may not be suitable for all types of apps or websites. 1. Ant Design: Ant Design is a design system created by Ant Financial. It offers a wide range of components and design patterns for building web applications. Key features include a comprehensive set of UI components, easy customization, and good documentation. Pros include a wealth of components and consistent design patterns, while cons include a steeper learning curve compared to Material Design. 2. Bootstrap: Bootstrap is a popular front-end framework that provides a scalable grid system, extensive pre-designed components, and responsive utilities. Key features include a grid system for easy layout creation, a library of CSS and JavaScript components, and support for responsive design. Pros of Bootstrap include its ease of use and extensive documentation, while cons include its heavy reliance on predefined styles. 3. Foundation: Foundation is a responsive front-end framework that offers a grid system, customizable components, and built-in templates. Key features include a flexible grid system, customizable design elements, and easy integration with other web technologies. Pros of Foundation include its flexibility and customizability, while cons include a potentially steeper learning curve compared to Material Design. 4. Bulma: Bulma is a modern CSS framework that emphasizes simplicity and flexibility. It offers a set of responsive, mobile-first CSS components that can be easily customized. Key features include a mobile-first design approach, a modular architecture, and extensive documentation. Pros of Bulma include its simplicity and ease of customization, while cons include a potentially limited set of components compared to Material Design. 5. Semantic UI: Semantic UI is a front-end development framework that emphasizes human-readable HTML and CSS classes for building responsive layouts. Key features include intuitive code structure, a wide range of components, and theming capabilities. Pros of Semantic UI include its readability and theming options, while cons include a potentially larger file size compared to Material Design. 6. Tailwind CSS: Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework that allows for rapid development and customization of responsive interfaces. Key features include a utility-first approach, customizable design system, and integration with any JavaScript framework. Pros of Tailwind CSS include its flexibility and efficiency, while cons include a potentially steeper learning curve compared to Material Design. 7. UIKit: UIKit is a lightweight and modular front-end framework for developing fast and powerful web interfaces. Key features include a modular architecture, a wide range of components, and a responsive grid system. Pros of UIKit include its lightweight nature and extensive documentation, while cons include a potentially limited set of components compared to Material Design. 8. Framer Motion: Framer Motion is an open-source and production-ready motion library for React that allows for easy creation of animated user interfaces. Key features include a declarative API for creating animations, support for gesture interactions, and community-driven resources. Pros of Framer Motion include its ease of use for creating animations, while cons include potentially limited design components compared to Material Design. 9. Carbon Design System: Carbon Design System is an open-source design system developed by IBM that provides a set of guidelines and resources for creating consistent user interfaces. Key features include a library of UI components, design tokens for customization, and accessibility support. Pros of Carbon Design System include its focus on accessibility and customization options, while cons include a potentially smaller community compared to Material Design. 10. Chakra UI: Chakra UI is a simple, modular and accessible component library for React applications. Key features include customizable component styles, a focus on accessibility, and support for theming. Pros of Chakra UI include its easy integration with React applications and accessibility features, while cons include potentially fewer components compared to Material Design.
Top Alternatives to Material Design
- Bootstrap
Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web. ...
- Material Design Lite
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. ...
- Flat UI
Flat UI is a beautiful theme for Bootstrap. We have redesigned many of its components to look flat in every pixel. ...
- Ant Design
An enterprise-class UI design language and React-based implementation. Graceful UI components out of the box, base on React Component. A npm + webpack + babel + dora + dva development framework. ...
- Material
Express your creativity with Material, an animation and graphics framework for Google's Material Design and Apple's Flat UI in Swift. ...
- iOS
It is the operating system that presently powers many of the mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. It is designed to make your iPhone and iPad experience even faster, more responsive, and more delightful. ...
- Material-UI
Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design. ...
- Angular Material
Sprint from Zero to App. Hit the ground running with comprehensive, modern UI components that work across the web, mobile and desktop. It allows to create material styled angular apps fast and easy. ...
Material Design alternatives & related posts
Bootstrap
- Responsiveness1.6K
- UI components1.2K
- Consistent943
- Great docs779
- Flexible677
- HTML, CSS, and JS framework472
- Open source411
- Widely used375
- Customizable368
- HTML framework242
- Easy setup77
- Popular77
- Mobile first77
- Great grid system57
- Great community52
- Future compatibility38
- Integration34
- Very powerful foundational front-end framework28
- Standard24
- Javascript plugins23
- Build faster prototypes19
- Preprocessors18
- Grids14
- Good for a person who hates CSS9
- Clean8
- Easy to setup and learn4
- Love it4
- Rapid development4
- Great and easy to use3
- Easy to use2
- Devin schumacher rules2
- Boostrap2
- Community2
- Provide angular wrapper2
- Great and easy2
- Powerful grid system, Rapid development, Customization2
- Great customer support2
- Popularity2
- Clean and quick frontend development2
- Great and easy to make a responsive website2
- Sprzedam opla2
- Painless front end development1
- Love the classes?1
- Responsive design1
- Poop1
- So clean and simple1
- Design Agnostic1
- Numerous components1
- Material-ui1
- Recognizable1
- Intuitive1
- Vue1
- Felxible, comfortable, user-friendly1
- Pre-Defined components1
- It's fast1
- Geo1
- Not tied to jQuery1
- The fame1
- Easy setup21
- Javascript is tied to jquery26
- Every site uses the defaults16
- Grid system break points aren't ideal15
- Too much heavy decoration in default look14
- Verbose styles8
- Super heavy1
related Bootstrap posts
I'm planning to create a web application and also a mobile application to provide a very good shopping experience to the end customers. Shortly, my application will be aggregate the product details from difference sources and giving a clear picture to the user that when and where to buy that product with best in Quality and cost.
I have planned to develop this in many milestones for adding N number of features and I have picked my first part to complete the core part (aggregate the product details from different sources).
As per my work experience and knowledge, I have chosen the followings stacks to this mission.
UI: I would like to develop this application using React, React Router and React Native since I'm a little bit familiar on this and also most importantly these will help on developing both web and mobile apps. In addition, I'm gonna use the stacks JavaScript, jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, Bootstrap wherever required.
Service: I have planned to use Java as the main business layer language as I have 7+ years of experience on this I believe I can do better work using Java than other languages. In addition, I'm thinking to use the stacks Node.js.
Database and ORM: I'm gonna pick MySQL as DB and Hibernate as ORM since I have a piece of good knowledge and also work experience on this combination.
Search Engine: I need to deal with a large amount of product data and it's in-detailed info to provide enough details to end user at the same time I need to focus on the performance area too. so I have decided to use Solr as a search engine for product search and suggestions. In addition, I'm thinking to replace Solr by Elasticsearch once explored/reviewed enough about Elasticsearch.
Host: As of now, my plan to complete the application with decent features first and deploy it in a free hosting environment like Docker and Heroku and then once it is stable then I have planned to use the AWS products Amazon S3, EC2, Amazon RDS and Amazon Route 53. I'm not sure about Microsoft Azure that what is the specialty in it than Heroku and Amazon EC2 Container Service. Anyhow, I will do explore these once again and pick the best suite one for my requirement once I reached this level.
Build and Repositories: I have decided to choose Apache Maven and Git as these are my favorites and also so popular on respectively build and repositories.
Additional Utilities :) - I would like to choose Codacy for code review as their Startup plan will be very helpful to this application. I'm already experienced with Google CheckStyle and SonarQube even I'm looking something on Codacy.
Happy Coding! Suggestions are welcome! :)
Thanks, Ganesa
For Etom, a side project. We wanted to test an idea for a future and bigger project.
What Etom does is searching places. Right now, it leverages the Google Maps API. For that, we found a React component that makes this integration easy because using Google Maps API is not possible via normal API requests.
You kind of need a map to work as a proxy between the software and Google Maps API.
We hate configuration(coming from Rails world) so also decided to use Create React App because setting up a React app, with all the toys, it's a hard job.
Thanks to all the people behind Create React App it's easier to start any React application.
We also chose a module called Reactstrap which is Bootstrap UI in React components.
An important thing in this side project(and in the bigger project plan) is to measure visitor through out the app. For that we researched and found that Keen was a good choice(very good free tier limits) and also it is very simple to setup and real simple to send data to
Slack and Trello are our defaults tools to comunicate ideas and discuss topics, so, no brainer using them as well for this project.
- Material Design straight from the original creators23
- Based on bem philosophy11
- Nice animations9
- SCSS7
- Simple Material Design5
- Doesn't depend on JavaScript5
- Custom color palette generates CDN2
related Material Design Lite posts
- Sass support1
- CSS class naming conventions are similar to Bootstrap1
- Good for mockups and minimal UI design1
- Basic Flat design1
- Not for creative and modern UI design1
related Flat UI posts
- Lots of components48
- Polished and enterprisey look and feel33
- TypeScript21
- Easy to integrate21
- Es6 support18
- Typescript support17
- Beautiful and solid17
- Beautifully Animated Components16
- Quick Release rhythm15
- Great documentation14
- Easy to customize Forms2
- Opensource and free of cost2
- Less24
- Large File Size10
- Poor accessibility support4
- Dangerous to use as a base in component libraries3
related Ant Design posts
Hi there!
I just want to have a simple poll/vote...
If you guys need a UI/Component Library for React, Vue.js, or AngularJS, which type of library would you prefer between:
1 ) A single maintained cross-framework library that is 100% compatible and can be integrated with any popular framework like Vue, React, Angular 2, Svelte, etc.
2) A native framework-specific library developed to work only on target framework like ElementUI for Vue, Ant Design for React.
Your advice would help a lot! Thanks in advance :)
Hello, A question to frontend developers. I am a beginner on frontend.
I am building a UI for my company to replace old legacy one with React and this question is about choosing how to apply design to it.
I have Tailwind CSS on one hand and Ant Design on the other (I didnt like mui and Bootstrap doesn't seem to have enterprise components as ant) As far as I understand, tailwind is great. It allows me to literally build an application without touching the css but I have to build my own react components with it. Ant design or mantine has ready to use components which I can use and rapidly build my application.
My question is, is it the right approach to: - Use a component framework for now and replace legacy app. - Introduce tailwind later when I have a frontend resource in hand and then build own component library
Thank you.
- Good Documentation1
- Samples included1
- IOS benefits1
related Material posts
- Integrated with other Apple products2
- Privacy1
- Apple1
related iOS posts
Hello,
We're just brainstorming for the moment and we have a few questions.
We have an idea for an app that we want to develop, here are the prerequisites:
1) cross-platform (iOS, Android, and website);
2) as easy to maintain as possible / well documented / widely used;
3) Visual Studio Code and Copilot compatible;
4) Text to speech;
5) Speech recognition;
6) Running in background (screen off with TTS and speech recognition);
7) could be using TypeScript;
8) Monetized through ad and in-App payment for premium version;
9) Display on lock screen (Android only I guess)
So what would you recommend?
I've been trying to review the options available, and I've considered:
NativeScript
React Native
Flutter
Any other?
Thanks in advance for your help, and I'm open to any comments.
Material-UI
- React141
- Material Design82
- Ui components60
- CSS framework30
- Component26
- Looks great15
- Responsive13
- Good documentation12
- LESS9
- Ui component8
- Open source7
- Flexible6
- Code examples6
- JSS5
- Supports old browsers out of the box3
- Interface3
- Angular3
- Very accessible3
- Fun3
- Typescript support2
- # of components2
- Designed for Server Side Rendering2
- Support for multiple styling systems1
- Accessibility1
- Easy to work with1
- Css1
- Hard to learn. Bad documentation36
- Hard to customize29
- Hard to understand Docs22
- Bad performance9
- Extra library needed for date/time pickers7
- For editable table component need to use material-table7
- Typescript Support2
- # of components1
related Material-UI posts
I picked up an idea to develop and it was no brainer I had to go with React for the frontend. I was faced with challenges when it came to what component framework to use. I had worked extensively with Material-UI but I needed something different that would offer me wider range of well customized components (I became pretty slow at styling). I brought in Evergreen after several sampling and reads online but again, after several prototype development against Evergreen—since I was using TypeScript and I had to import custom Type, it felt exhaustive. After I validated Evergreen with the designs of the idea I was developing, I also noticed I might have to do a lot of styling. I later stumbled on Material Kit, the one specifically made for React . It was promising with beautifully crafted components, most of which fits into the designs pages I had on ground.
A major problem of Material Kit for me is it isn't written in TypeScript and there isn't any plans to support its TypeScript version. I rolled up my sleeve and started converting their components to TypeScript and if you'll ask me, I am still on it.
In summary, I used the Create React App with TypeScript support and I am spending some time converting Material Kit to TypeScript before I start developing against it. All of these components are going to be hosted on Bit.
If you feel I am crazy or I have gotten something wrong, I'll be willing to listen to your opinion. Also, if you want to have a share of whatever TypeScript version of Material Kit I end up coming up with, let me know.
I just finished tweaking styles details of my hobby project MovieGeeks (https://moviegeeks.co/): The minimalist Online Movie Catalog
This time I want to share my thoughts on the Tech-Stack I decided to use on the Frontend: React, React Router, Material-UI and React-Apollo:
React is by far the Front-End "framework" with the biggest community. Some of the newest features like Suspense and Hooks makes it even more awesome and gives you even more power to write clean UI's
Material UI is a very solid and stable set of react components that not only look good, but also are easy to use and customize. This was my first time using this library and I am very happy with the result
React-Apollo in my opinion is the best GraphQL client for a React application. Easy to use and understand and it gives you awesome features out of the box like cache. With libraries like react-apollo-hooks you can even use it with the hooks api which makes the code cleaner and easier to follow.
Any feedback is much appreciated :)
- Components12
- Backed by a well known company8
- Simple4
- Easy3
- Very good documentation2
- Rte2
- Implements well known material design1
- Fairly large4
- Look like 90s stuffs2
- Suck2
- Shit2
related Angular Material posts
I am a novice to AngularJS, but I have a strong web development background. I need help with the pros and cons of choosing the Angular Material or PrimeNg for our new application. Our new application will be using Angular for the front-end and .NET Core for the Web API. I looked at both tools and leaned toward Angular Material. It would be beneficial if I could obtain some expert advice from the community.