Angular Material vs react-beautiful-dnd: What are the differences?

Introduction

Angular Material and react-beautiful-dnd are both popular libraries used for building user interfaces. However, there are several key differences between the two that are worth noting.

1. Component Library vs Drag and Drop Library: Angular Material is primarily a component library that provides pre-designed UI components and styles for web applications. It offers a wide range of ready-to-use components like buttons, cards, menus, and forms. On the other hand, react-beautiful-dnd is a drag and drop library specifically designed for handling complex drag and drop interactions. It provides a set of components and hooks to enable smooth and customizable drag and drop functionality.

2. Framework vs Library: Angular Material is part of the Angular framework, which is a full-fledged JavaScript framework for building web applications. It provides features like routing, state management, and dependency injection along with the UI components of Angular Material. In contrast, react-beautiful-dnd is a standalone library that can be used with any JavaScript framework, including React. It is focused solely on drag and drop functionality and does not provide additional framework features.

3. Declarative vs Imperative: Angular Material follows a more declarative approach, where UI components are created using HTML templates with Angular-specific syntax. Developers define the structure and behavior of the UI by composing these components and binding data to them. React-beautiful-dnd, on the other hand, follows an imperative approach, where drag and drop interactions are handled using JavaScript functions and callbacks. Developers have more control over the behavior of the drag and drop functionality.

4. Style Customization: Angular Material provides a theming system that allows developers to easily customize the styling of the UI components. It provides CSS preprocessor variables and mixins for modifying colors, typography, and other style attributes. React-beautiful-dnd, on the other hand, does not provide a theming system out of the box. Styling of the drag and drop components needs to be done manually using custom CSS or other styling solutions.

5. Community Support and Ecosystem: Angular Material is maintained by the Angular team and has a large and active community. It has been widely adopted and has a rich ecosystem with many additional libraries, tools, and resources available. React-beautiful-dnd is maintained by the Atlassian team and also has a strong community following. However, the React ecosystem as a whole is larger and more mature, which means there may be more resources and integrations available for react-beautiful-dnd.

6. Learning Curve: Angular Material is tightly integrated with the Angular framework, which means developers need to have knowledge of Angular to effectively use Angular Material components. This can result in a steeper learning curve, especially for developers new to Angular. React-beautiful-dnd, on the other hand, can be used with React, which has a simpler and more intuitive API. This can make it easier for developers familiar with React to start using react-beautiful-dnd.

In summary, the key differences between Angular Material and react-beautiful-dnd lie in their primary focus (component library vs drag and drop library), their integration within frameworks (Angular vs React), their approach to building UI (declarative vs imperative), style customization options, community support, and the learning curve associated with each library.