Overview

Material-UI

Stacks2.7K

Followers3.7K

Votes445

Material Kit

Stacks29

Followers88

Votes0

Material Kit vs Material UI: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will compare the key differences between Material Kit and Material-UI, two popular front-end frameworks based on Google's Material Design principles.

Component Library: Material Kit is a free UI kit available as a set of pre-built components for HTML and CSS. It provides a wide range of ready-to-use elements such as buttons, cards, forms, and navigation bars, allowing developers to quickly build user interfaces. On the other hand, Material-UI is a comprehensive React component library that implements Material Design components in React. It offers a rich collection of customizable components that can be easily integrated into React applications.
Design Philosophy: Material Kit is focused on providing a clean and minimalistic design, emphasizing simplicity and ease of use. It follows the material design guidelines closely, ensuring consistency and familiarity to users. Material-UI, on the other hand, not only adheres to the material design principles but also adds some additional features and improvements to enhance the user experience. It offers more customization options and flexibility in terms of design.
Dependencies: Material Kit is a standalone HTML and CSS framework, and it does not have any dependencies on other libraries or frameworks. This makes it easy to integrate with any existing project. Material-UI, on the other hand, is built on top of React, which means it requires React as a dependency. This makes it more suitable for developers who are already using or planning to use React.
Community and Support: Material Kit has a large and active community of developers who contribute to its development and provide support through forums, documentation, and online resources. Material-UI also has a strong community and is backed by the official Material-UI team. It has extensive documentation, examples, and a dedicated support channel, making it easy for developers to get help and guidance when needed.
Integration with React Ecosystem: As mentioned earlier, Material-UI is built specifically for React, which means it integrates seamlessly with other React libraries, tools, and ecosystems. It follows the React component lifecycle and provides hooks and utilities that are specific to React development. Material Kit, being a standalone HTML and CSS framework, does not provide this level of integration with the React ecosystem.
Customization and Theming: Material Kit provides a limited amount of customization options, mainly through CSS classes and variables. It allows developers to change colors, fonts, and some other visual aspects to match their branding and design requirements. Material-UI, on the other hand, offers extensive customization and theming capabilities. It provides a theming system that allows developers to create and apply custom themes throughout their applications, making it easier to maintain a consistent look and feel.

In Summary, Material Kit is a standalone HTML and CSS framework focused on simplicity and ease of use, while Material-UI is a comprehensive React component library that offers more customization options, integration with the React ecosystem, and extensive theming capabilities.

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Advice on Material-UI, Material Kit

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.

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Comments

Xinyi

Software Developer at DCSIL

Oct 9, 2020

Decided

As our team will be building a web application, HTML5 and CSS3 are one of the standardized combinations to implement the structure and the styling of a webpage. Material-UI comes with all sorts of predesigned web components such as buttons and dropdowns that will save us tons of development time. Since it is a component library designed for React, it suits our needs. However, we do acknowledge that predesigned components may sometimes cause pains especially when it comes to custom styling. To make our life even easier, we also adopted Tailwind CSS. It is a CSS framework providing low-level utility classes that will act as building blocks when we create custom designs.

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Comments

Abigail

Dec 10, 2019

Decided

Fonts and typography are fun. Material Design is a framework (developed by Google) that basically geeks out on how to assemble your typographical elements together into a design language. If you're into fonts and typography, it's fantastic. It provides a theming engine, reusable components, and can pull different user interfaces together under a common design paradigm. I'd highly recommend looking into Borries Schwesinger's book "The Form Book" if you're going to be working with Material UI or are otherwise new to component design.

https://www.amazon.com/Form-Book-Creating-Printed-Online/dp/0500515085

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Detailed Comparison

Material-UI	Material Kit
Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design.	Material Kit is a Free Bootstrap UI Kit with a fresh, new design inspired by Google's material design. You asked for it, so we built it. It's a great pleasure to introduce to you the material concepts in an easy to use and beautiful set of components. Along with the restyling of the Bootstrap elements, you will find three fully-coded example pages, to help you design your next project.
Tables; Forms; Snackbars; Buttons; Theming	-
Statistics
Stacks 2.7K	Stacks 29
Followers 3.7K	Followers 88
Votes 445	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 141 React 82 Material Design 60 Ui components 30 CSS framework 26 Component Cons 36 Hard to learn. Bad documentation 29 Hard to customize 22 Hard to understand Docs 9 Bad performance 7 For editable table component need to use material-table	No community feedback yet
Integrations
React Emotion Next.js styled-components Node.js	Bootstrap

What are some alternatives to Material-UI, Material Kit?

Bootstrap

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

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.

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.