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Flat UI vs Material Design: What are the differences?
Flat UI: Free Bootstrap Framework and Theme. Flat UI is a beautiful theme for Bootstrap. We have redesigned many of its components to look flat in every pixel; Material Design: Google's Material Design. Material Design is a unified system that combines theory, resources, and tools for crafting digital experiences.
Flat UI and Material Design can be primarily classified as "Front-End Frameworks" tools.
Flat UI is an open source tool with 14.5K GitHub stars and 2.46K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Flat UI's open source repository on GitHub.
Google, SkyQuest, and GEMServers are some of the popular companies that use Material Design, whereas Flat UI is used by Apexure, Leonis Holding, and SkyQuest. Material Design has a broader approval, being mentioned in 25 company stacks & 38 developers stacks; compared to Flat UI, which is listed in 4 company stacks and 3 developer stacks.
I am a bit confused when to choose Bootstrap vs Material Design or Tailwind CSS, and why? I mean, in which kind of projects we can work with bootstrap/Material/Tailwind CSS? If the design is made up on the grid, we prefer bootstrap, and if flat design, then material design. Similarly, when do we choose tailwind CSS?
Any suggestion would be appreciated?
Hi Ashish,
If you need minimal work to be done from your end and like most of the components / design available out of the box - go with Bootstrap. This is the oldest and has the widest adoption and a whole range of components built out by others.
If you like Material design, this is a good choice too. Please note that Bootstrap also has a Material theme, though it is not as native.
Both of these above frameworks are bulky and has more than what you may need.
If you like to build micro-components in a elegant way, TailwindCSS is the way to go.
I don't know about material design.
You would go with Bootstrap if you want to prototype / build something without bothering about the design at all and you are OK if everything looks kinda template-y, using bootstrap out of the box components.
Go with Tailwind if you need a sleek design, a user interface where building with components will be important (because tailwind strongly favors component-based UI), and you know you will need to extend the built-in classes with your own (because tailwind is very easy to extend)
I would personally recommend tailwind over bootstrap any day of the week.
Tailwind is great you don't have to mess with naming things and it is so much more flexible than the cookie cutter bootstrap, but I don't know about material UI. I recommend tailwind it's super simple to learn and has great code snippets.
Put simply, you should use Tailwind regardless. It is a great addition to whatever you use because it removes the hassle of writing CSS.
Ant Design offers the most components with JS and CSS taken care of. They look clean, professional, and usable.
We paired this with Bulma for making the containers and structure reactive. Bulma (for react) make it easy to just add a section, container, and content and have it work on all platforms.
We also use Geist UI, though not recognized by Stack share, for its simple and modern feel. Highly recommend Geist if you want modern components for complicated UI's
Pros of Flat UI
- Sass support1
- CSS class naming conventions are similar to Bootstrap1
- Good for mockups and minimal UI design1
- Basic Flat design1
Pros of Material Design
- They really set a new bar in design5
- An intuitive design4
- Simply, And Beautiful3
- Many great libraries2
- Composants0
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Cons of Flat UI
- Not for creative and modern UI design1
Cons of Material Design
- Sometimes, it can hang the browser2