Elm vs Material UI

Overview

Material-UI

Stacks2.7K

Followers3.7K

Votes445

Elm

Stacks759

Followers745

Votes319

Elm vs Material UI: What are the differences?

Introduction: Elm and Material UI are two popular tools used for developing user interfaces. While Elm is a functional programming language used for building web applications, Material UI is a React component library that helps in designing appealing user interfaces.

Framework vs Component Library: Elm is a complete framework that provides a full toolset for front-end development, including its own syntax, architecture, and libraries. On the other hand, Material UI is a component library that offers pre-designed UI components that can be easily integrated into React applications.
Programming Paradigm: Elm follows a functional programming paradigm, emphasizing immutability and pure functions, which leads to more robust and predictable code. In contrast, Material UI is based on React, which follows a component-based architecture where components manage their own states, leading to encapsulated and reusable code.
Customization Flexibility: In Elm, developers have more control over the design and behavior of their applications due to its reactive model and pure functions, allowing for extensive customization. Material UI, although providing a wide range of components, might limit customization options as it follows Google's Material Design guidelines closely.
Type Safety: Elm has a strong emphasis on type safety with its static type system and compiler that catches errors at compile time, ensuring code correctness. Material UI, being a React library, relies on PropTypes for type checking, which is not as strict as Elm's type system.
Learning Curve: Elm, with its functional programming concepts and strict architecture, can have a steeper learning curve for developers who are not familiar with functional programming paradigms. Material UI, leveraging React for component management, may be more accessible to developers already acquainted with React development.
Community Support: Elm, while having a robust and supportive community, might be smaller in comparison to the vast community of React and Material UI developers. This difference in community size can impact the availability of resources, tutorials, and third-party packages to enhance development in Elm compared to Material UI.

In Summary, Elm and Material UI differ in their approach towards front-end development with Elm focusing on functional programming, type safety, and extensive customization, while Material UI provides a more component-based, React-oriented development experience with wider community support.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Material-UI, Elm

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

767k views767k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Material-UI	Elm
Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design.	Writing HTML apps is super easy with elm-lang/html. Not only does it render extremely fast, it also quietly guides you towards well-architected code.
Tables; Forms; Snackbars; Buttons; Theming	No Runtime Exceptions; Fearless refactoring; Understand anyone's code; Fast and friendly feedback; Enforced Semantic Versioning; Small Assets
Statistics
Stacks 2.7K	Stacks 759
Followers 3.7K	Followers 745
Votes 445	Votes 319
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 Extra library needed for date/time pickers	Pros 46 Code stays clean 45 Great type system 41 No Runtime Exceptions 34 Fun 29 Easy to understand Cons 3 No typeclasses -> repitition (i.e. map has 130versions) 3 JS interop can not be async 2 JS interoperability a bit more involved 1 No JSX/Template 1 No communication with users
Integrations
React Emotion Next.js styled-components Node.js	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Material-UI, Elm?

Bootstrap

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

Meteor

A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.

Bower

Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.

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.

Related Comparisons

Elm vs Material UI: What are the differences?

Framework vs Component Library: Elm is a complete framework that provides a full toolset for front-end development, including its own syntax, architecture, and libraries. On the other hand, Material UI is a component library that offers pre-designed UI components that can be easily integrated into React applications.
Programming Paradigm: Elm follows a functional programming paradigm, emphasizing immutability and pure functions, which leads to more robust and predictable code. In contrast, Material UI is based on React, which follows a component-based architecture where components manage their own states, leading to encapsulated and reusable code.
Customization Flexibility: In Elm, developers have more control over the design and behavior of their applications due to its reactive model and pure functions, allowing for extensive customization. Material UI, although providing a wide range of components, might limit customization options as it follows Google's Material Design guidelines closely.
Type Safety: Elm has a strong emphasis on type safety with its static type system and compiler that catches errors at compile time, ensuring code correctness. Material UI, being a React library, relies on PropTypes for type checking, which is not as strict as Elm's type system.
Learning Curve: Elm, with its functional programming concepts and strict architecture, can have a steeper learning curve for developers who are not familiar with functional programming paradigms. Material UI, leveraging React for component management, may be more accessible to developers already acquainted with React development.
Community Support: Elm, while having a robust and supportive community, might be smaller in comparison to the vast community of React and Material UI developers. This difference in community size can impact the availability of resources, tutorials, and third-party packages to enhance development in Elm compared to Material UI.

Elm vs Material UI

Overview