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Foundation vs Material UI: What are the differences?
Introduction:
Foundation and Material UI are both popular front-end frameworks used for designing and developing websites and web applications. While they share similarities in terms of being responsive and customizable, there are several key differences between the two that set them apart.
Grid System: One major difference between Foundation and Material UI lies in their grid systems. Foundation utilizes a flexbox grid system, which allows for more flexible and fluid layouts. On the other hand, Material UI uses a grid system based on the 12-column grid layout, providing a more traditional and structured approach to designing layouts.
Design Philosophy: Another key difference between Foundation and Material UI is their design philosophy. Foundation focuses on providing a modular and component-based approach to web design, allowing developers to mix and match components according to their needs. In contrast, Material UI follows Google's Material Design principles, emphasizing a unified and consistent visual language across platforms.
Component Library: Foundation and Material UI also differ in terms of their component libraries. Foundation offers a comprehensive set of UI components, including navigation bars, forms, and buttons. However, Material UI goes a step further by providing a larger and more extensive library of ready-to-use components that adhere to the Material Design guidelines, covering a wide range of UI elements.
Customization Options: When it comes to customization, Foundation and Material UI have varying degrees of flexibility. Foundation allows for greater customization, offering a wide range of options to tweak the appearance and behavior of components. On the other hand, Material UI focuses more on maintaining a consistent visual language and offers fewer customization options out-of-the-box, but provides a theming system that allows for more advanced customization if needed.
Community and Ecosystem: Foundation and Material UI also differ in terms of their community and ecosystem. Foundation has a long-standing community with a wealth of resources and plugins available. However, Material UI benefits from being maintained by Google and has a larger community and ecosystem, with more active development and support for a variety of platforms and frameworks.
Compatibility and Integration: Finally, Foundation and Material UI differ in terms of their compatibility and integration with other technologies. Foundation is known for its compatibility with a wide range of browsers and devices, including older versions. In contrast, Material UI is more tightly integrated with React, making it a popular choice for developers using React as their front-end JavaScript library.
In summary, while both Foundation and Material UI are popular front-end frameworks, they differ in terms of their grid systems, design philosophies, component libraries, customization options, community and ecosystem, as well as compatibility and integration with other technologies. These differences make them suitable for different use cases and preferences in web development.
My React website is a simple 5-pager that attaches to a database to store and display registrations and other data. The user (small user base) can change any form elements, but I don't need theme-ing, though that would be fun for the user. reactstrap/react-bootstrap built on Bootstrap 4 sounds dated. I am familiar with reactstrap, but a friend said to try Material-UI. The thought of learning it is interesting, but somehow I think it might be overkill. So... reactstrap, react-bootstrap, or Material UI, which should I use?
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
I recommend Material-UI for a couple reasons. 1. It’s very easy to throw MUI into React. You can essentially just import the components you need in place of yours. Effectively, for a button, for example, you can swap out <button for MUI’s <Button and you can be done if that’s all you want. Looks great, no hassle, and they have simple guides to help you make good UI decisions on top of that. 2. It’s pretty up-to-date, and it has great docs. I use MUI all the time, and if I were doing a simple, small user-base app, I would definitely use it for the sake of convenience and speed of development.
I've used material UI and had great success with it on React projects. Semantic UI is also another great option https://semantic-ui.com/.
When you say its "overkill", I would think long term. I do a lot of small projects not only for the purpose of the project, but also for learning, future projects and to use professionaly. It's a long-term investment.
It's totally the design decision if you like to follow bootstrap design then you should go for reactstrap. But if you want to follow google material design then you should go for material ui.
Material-UI looks great and is easy to use. Highly recommended, my favourite UI framework for React.
Much more modern in terms on support for css in js. But go for v5 not v4 as material-ui is going through a transition in term of its own implementation
Chakra UI seems like the perfect fit in my opinion. It has a much powerful design system, all the necessary components and it is dead simple to learn. And pretty easy to customize too.
Material-UI is the good choice for a small project. It's fast for development, maintenance, and is ready to use. It HaveMaterial-UI is the good choice for a small project. It's fast for development, maintenance, and is ready to use. Has an excellent documentation with pratic examples.
Bootstrap is useful for rapid prototyping using an existing design system. Since the design system can be used in standard HTML + Javascript and can be imported for free into a Figma project, it lowers the complexity of our mock-up creation and frontend styling, all while promoting consistency. We did not choose Material UI, because it does not have a free design system to import into Figma.
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.
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.
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
Pros of Foundation
- Responsive grid160
- Mobile first93
- Open source80
- Semantic75
- Customizable72
- Quick to prototype52
- Simple ui50
- Fast45
- Best practices44
- Easy setup39
- Neutral style6
- HTML, SCSS and JS6
- Accessibility support5
- Professional5
- Xy grid3
- Sass2
- Every new version is smaller, smarter & more efficient2
- Robust1
Pros of Material-UI
- React141
- Material Design82
- Ui components60
- CSS framework30
- Component26
- Looks great15
- Responsive13
- Good documentation12
- LESS9
- Ui component8
- Open source7
- Flexible6
- Code examples6
- JSS5
- Supports old browsers out of the box3
- Interface3
- Angular3
- Very accessible3
- Fun3
- Typescript support2
- # of components2
- Designed for Server Side Rendering2
- Support for multiple styling systems1
- Accessibility1
- Easy to work with1
- Css1
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Cons of Foundation
- Requires jQuery5
- Awful site4
Cons of Material-UI
- Hard to learn. Bad documentation36
- Hard to customize29
- Hard to understand Docs22
- Bad performance9
- Extra library needed for date/time pickers7
- For editable table component need to use material-table7
- Typescript Support2
- # of components1
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