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. Bootstrap vs Material Design for Angular vs Topcoat

Bootstrap vs Material Design for Angular vs Topcoat

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Bootstrap
Bootstrap
Stacks57.4K
Followers13.2K
Votes7.7K
GitHub Stars173.6K
Forks79.2K
Topcoat
Topcoat
Stacks3
Followers13
Votes15
GitHub Stars4.2K
Forks368
Material Design for Angular
Material Design for Angular
Stacks11.8K
Followers9.6K
Votes522
GitHub Stars16.5K
Forks3.4K

Bootstrap vs Material Design for Angular vs Topcoat: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Bootstrap and Material Design for Angular and Topcoat

  1. Grid System: Bootstrap uses a 12-column grid system while Material Design for Angular and Topcoat utilize different grid structures, with Material Design following Google's guidelines and Topcoat focusing on simplicity and performance.

  2. Design Philosophy: Bootstrap follows a more traditional design approach with a focus on consistency and utility, while Material Design for Angular emphasizes meaningful motion, depth, and visual cues to create a more immersive user experience. Topcoat, on the other hand, adopts a minimalist design philosophy with a strong emphasis on performance optimization.

  3. Components and Customization: Bootstrap offers a wide range of components out-of-the-box, allowing for easy customization through its extensive documentation and community support. Material Design for Angular provides components that adhere strictly to Google's Material Design guidelines, offering a cohesive visual language across different platforms. Topcoat offers a lightweight set of UI components that are highly customizable, aiming for simplicity and flexibility.

  4. Integration with Angular: Material Design for Angular is specifically designed to seamlessly integrate with Angular frameworks, providing developers with pre-built components and services that align with Angular best practices. Bootstrap, although widely used with Angular, may require additional effort for integration due to differences in design principles and component structures. Topcoat also offers integration with Angular, focusing on providing efficient, lightweight components that work well within an Angular environment.

  5. Animation and Transitions: Material Design for Angular places a strong emphasis on animations and transitions to enhance user interactions and convey the hierarchy of elements on the screen. Bootstrap also offers animation utilities, but they are not as integral to the design framework as in Material Design. Topcoat, being focused on performance, keeps animations to a minimum to ensure fast loading times and smooth user experience.

  6. Theming and Styling: Material Design for Angular and Bootstrap both offer comprehensive theming and styling options, allowing developers to easily customize the look and feel of their applications. Topcoat, while providing some level of theming capabilities, prioritizes a consistent design language and performance optimization over extensive theming options.

In Summary, the key differences between Bootstrap, Material Design for Angular, and Topcoat lie in their grid systems, design philosophies, components and customization options, integration with Angular, approach to animation and transitions, and theming and styling capabilities.

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 Bootstrap, Topcoat, Material Design for Angular

Bridget
Bridget

Full Stack Developer at Bridget Sarah

May 29, 2020

Decided

I do prefer to write things from scratch however when it came to wanting to jump-start the frontend, I found that it was taking me a lot longer hence why needing to use something very fast.

Bootstrap was the boom when it came out, I didn't like it, to be honest, set in its way and a pain to over-ride and in addition, you can tell from a distance if you're using boostrap and as everything looks the same.

I came across Tailwind CSS as I wanted more dynamic features, you could say, I've been now doing it for a few days and I love it a lot. I've been practising with the full stack part installed but I an't we wait until I do a new project, and I'll e able to select exactly what I want. Much faster.

681k views681k
Comments
Daniel
Daniel

Frontend Developer at atSistemas

Jun 10, 2020

Needs adviceonNew RelicNew RelicNext.jsNext.jsReactReact

I'm building, from scratch, a webapp. It's going to be a dashboard to check on our apps in New Relic and update the Apdex from the webapp. I have just chosen Next.js as our framework because we use React already, and after going through the tutorial, I just loved the latest changes they have implemented.

But we have to decide on a CSS framework for the UI. I'm partial to Bulma because I love that it's all about CSS (and you can use SCSS from the start), that it's rather lightweight and that it doesn't come with JavaScript clutter. One of the things I hate about Bootstrap is that you depend on jQuery to use the JavaScript part. My boss loves UIkIt, but when I've used it in the past, I didn't like it.

What do you think we should use? Maybe you have another suggestion?

1.07M views1.07M
Comments
Kexin
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.

281k views281k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Bootstrap
Bootstrap
Topcoat
Topcoat
Material Design for Angular
Material Design for Angular

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

TopCoat is made up of base controls, platform specific styles, themes and a build script to stitch them all together.

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.

Preprocessors: Bootstrap ships with vanilla CSS, but its source code utilizes the two most popular CSS preprocessors, Less and Sass. Quickly get started with precompiled CSS or build on the source.;One framework, every device: Bootstrap easily and efficiently scales your websites and applications with a single code base, from phones to tablets to desktops with CSS media queries.;Full of features: With Bootstrap, you get extensive and beautiful documentation for common HTML elements, dozens of custom HTML and CSS components, and awesome jQuery plugins.
Components Galore; Themeable;BEM Architecture;Even our font is open source;Icons how you want them;PSD included;Available via CDN
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
173.6K
GitHub Stars
4.2K
GitHub Stars
16.5K
GitHub Forks
79.2K
GitHub Forks
368
GitHub Forks
3.4K
Stacks
57.4K
Stacks
3
Stacks
11.8K
Followers
13.2K
Followers
13
Followers
9.6K
Votes
7.7K
Votes
15
Votes
522
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 1582
    Responsiveness
  • 1193
    UI components
  • 943
    Consistent
  • 779
    Great docs
  • 677
    Flexible
Cons
  • 26
    Javascript is tied to jquery
  • 16
    Every site uses the defaults
  • 15
    Grid system break points aren't ideal
  • 14
    Too much heavy decoration in default look
  • 8
    Verbose styles
Pros
  • 3
    Open source
  • 3
    Backed by Adobe
  • 2
    Pretty
  • 2
    Themeable
  • 1
    BEM Architecture
Pros
  • 122
    Ui components
  • 63
    Backed by google
  • 51
    Backed by angular
  • 51
    Free
  • 47
    Javascript
Cons
  • 4
    No practical examples
Integrations
No integrations availableNo integrations available
AngularJS
AngularJS

What are some alternatives to Bootstrap, Topcoat, Material Design for Angular?

Foundation

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 UI

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

Materialize

Materialize

A CSS Framework based on material design.

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.

Vuetify

Vuetify

Vuetify is a component framework for Vue.js 2. It aims to provide clean, semantic and reusable components that make building your application a breeze. Vuetify utilizes Google's Material Design design pattern, taking cues from other popular frameworks such as Materialize.css, Material Design Lite, Semantic UI and Bootstrap 4.

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