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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Front End Frameworks
  5. Flat UI vs Material UI

Flat UI vs Material UI

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Material-UI
Material-UI
Stacks2.7K
Followers3.7K
Votes445
Flat UI
Flat UI
Stacks107
Followers143
Votes4
GitHub Stars15.2K
Forks2.3K

Flat UI vs Material UI: What are the differences?

<Flat UI and Material UI are two popular design frameworks used in web development. Flat UI focuses on minimalism and simplicity, while Material UI follows Google's Material Design guidelines which emphasize depth, shadow, and movement. Below are the key differences between Flat UI and Material UI.>

  1. Visual Design: Flat UI features flat design elements like minimalism, simplicity, and clean typography, providing a simple and sleek look. In contrast, Material UI includes material design aspects such as layered elements, shadows, and animations that mimic real-world interactions, creating a more dynamic and engaging user experience.

  2. Color Scheme: Flat UI typically utilizes a limited color palette with bold, primary colors to enhance visual appeal and contrast. On the other hand, Material UI employs a more extensive color system based on Material Design guidelines, including vibrant accent colors, creating a more visually stimulating and interactive interface for users.

  3. Typography: In Flat UI, typography is straightforward and usually consists of sans-serif fonts to maintain the minimalist aesthetic. Meanwhile, Material UI incorporates a combination of typography styles, including a variety of fonts and font weights, to create hierarchy and emphasize different elements on the interface.

  4. Depth and Dimension: Flat UI design elements appear flat on the screen without any depth or dimension, providing a more two-dimensional look. In contrast, Material UI uses shadows, layers, and animations to create a sense of depth, guiding users through the interface and enhancing visual hierarchy and usability.

  5. User Interaction: Flat UI focuses on simplicity and usability, with a minimalistic approach to user interactions like button clicks and transitions. Material UI, on the other hand, incorporates motion and animations to provide users with visual feedback and guide them through different actions, enhancing the overall user experience.

  6. Adoption and Ecosystem: Flat UI has been popular among designers and developers for its simplicity and ease of use, leading to a wide variety of resources and themes available for implementation. Material UI, as part of Google's Material Design system, has a strong community support and extensive documentation, making it a preferred choice for projects that require scalability and consistency.

In Summary, the key differences between Flat UI and Material UI lie in their visual design approaches, color schemes, typography styles, depth and dimension implementation, user interactions, and adoption within the design community.

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Advice on Material-UI, Flat UI

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
Xinyi
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.

359k views359k
Comments
Max
Max

Apr 26, 2021

Review

MaterialUI may be overkill for such a simple project, you're right. So I'm recommending both tools in this StackShare form.

But if it's planned to increase the project, consider migrating it to MUI in advance. Among its pros I can name:

  • brilliant TS support
  • all popular use cases covered
  • well documented
  • backed by sponsors == will live and be maintained
46.9k views46.9k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Material-UI
Material-UI
Flat UI
Flat UI

Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design.

Flat UI is a beautiful theme for Bootstrap. We have redesigned many of its components to look flat in every pixel.

Tables; Forms; Snackbars; Buttons; Theming
Bootstrap-based;Retina Ready Images and Icons;Custom form components;Sleek CSS3 effects;Easy configurable color scheme
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
15.2K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
2.3K
Stacks
2.7K
Stacks
107
Followers
3.7K
Followers
143
Votes
445
Votes
4
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
Pros
  • 1
    Good for mockups and minimal UI design
  • 1
    Basic Flat design
  • 1
    CSS class naming conventions are similar to Bootstrap
  • 1
    Sass support
Cons
  • 1
    Not for creative and modern UI design
Integrations
React
React
Emotion
Emotion
Next.js
Next.js
styled-components
styled-components
Node.js
Node.js
Bootstrap
Bootstrap

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

Bootstrap

Bootstrap

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

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 Design for Angular

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

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.

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