Ionic vs Material UI

Overview

Ionic

Stacks9.5K

Followers8.6K

Votes1.8K

Material-UI

Stacks2.7K

Followers3.7K

Votes445

Ionic vs Material UI: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Ionic and Material UI. Both Ionic and Material UI are popular frameworks used for building user interfaces, but each has its own distinct features and advantages.

Design Philosophy: Ionic follows a mobile-first design philosophy, making it suitable for building cross-platform mobile applications. It provides a set of pre-designed UI components that are optimized for mobile use. On the other hand, Material UI is based on Google's Material Design principles, which focus on providing a visually appealing and intuitive user interface across different devices and platforms.
Supported Platforms: Ionic is primarily aimed at developing hybrid mobile applications that can run on multiple platforms like iOS, Android, and the web. It achieves this by using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Material UI, on the other hand, is a React component library that can be used to build web applications. It does not specifically target mobile platforms but can be used to create responsive layouts.
Component Customization: Ionic provides a wide range of customizable UI components out-of-the-box, allowing developers to create visually appealing mobile applications quickly. It also offers theming capabilities to change the look and feel of the components. Material UI, on the other hand, provides highly customizable React components that can be easily tailored to meet the specific design requirements. It offers extensive theming options and allows for greater control over the visual appearance.
Ease of Use: Ionic is known for its simplicity and ease of use, making it a popular choice for developers who want to quickly build mobile applications. It provides a command-line interface (CLI) that helps in scaffolding, debugging, and building the application. Material UI, being a React library, requires some prior knowledge of React and JSX syntax. It might have a steeper learning curve for developers who are new to React.
Integration with Frameworks: Ionic is built on Angular, a popular JavaScript framework for building web applications. It leverages the power of Angular to handle data binding, dependency injection, and other aspects of the application development process. Material UI, on the other hand, is a React component library, and it seamlessly integrates with React's virtual DOM, state management, and event handling system.
Community and Ecosystem: Ionic has a large and active community, with an extensive library of plugins and extensions available for various functionalities. It also provides a marketplace for developers to sell their own Ionic components. Material UI, being a popular React library, also has a vast community support and an ecosystem of third-party libraries and tools. It benefits from React's popularity and the wider JavaScript ecosystem.

In summary, Ionic is a mobile-first framework for building cross-platform mobile applications with a focus on simplicity and ease of use. Material UI, on the other hand, is a React component library that provides highly customizable UI components and follows Google's Material Design principles for creating visually appealing web applications.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Ionic, Material-UI

Anonymous

CEO at ME!

Jun 7, 2020

Decided

While with Ionic it is possible to make mobile applications with only web technologies, Flutter is more performant and is easy to use if you are willing to learn Dart, which is a fun language. Plus, it has awesome documentation and, while its ecosystem isn't near as big as JavaScript's is, it has a good package manager called Pub and its packages are generally high quality.

403k views403k

Comments

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

Thuan

FE Lead at SOLID ENGINEER

Jun 16, 2020

Decided

Javascripts is the most populated language in the world.
Easy to learn & deployed production
Fast development
Strong community
Completed Documents
Native performance with lower RAM used.
Easy to handle native issues by using native code like Java / Objective C
Powered by Facebook.

666k views666k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Ionic	Material-UI
Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.	Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design.
Performance obsessed;Utilizes Angular and React;Native focused;Beautifully designed;Based on Web Components;	Tables; Forms; Snackbars; Buttons; Theming
Statistics
Stacks 9.5K	Stacks 2.7K
Followers 8.6K	Followers 3.7K
Votes 1.8K	Votes 445
Pros & Cons
Pros 248 Allows for rapid prototyping 228 Hybrid mobile 208 It's angularjs 186 Free 179 It's javascript, html, and css Cons 20 Not suitable for high performance or UI intensive apps 15 Not meant for game development 2 Not a native app	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
Integrations
No integrations available	React Emotion Next.js styled-components Node.js

What are some alternatives to Ionic, Material-UI?

Bootstrap

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

Flutter

Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.

React Native

React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.

Xamarin

Xamarin’s Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio*), as well as skills in .NET and the C# programming language, to create mobile applications for the industry’s most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based smartphones and tablets, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

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.

NativeScript

NativeScript enables developers to build native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Universal while sharing the application code across the platforms. When building the application UI, developers use our libraries, which abstract the differences between the native platforms.

Blazor

Blazor is a .NET web framework that runs in any browser. You author Blazor apps using C#/Razor and HTML.

Related Comparisons

Ionic vs Material UI: What are the differences?

Introduction

Design Philosophy: Ionic follows a mobile-first design philosophy, making it suitable for building cross-platform mobile applications. It provides a set of pre-designed UI components that are optimized for mobile use. On the other hand, Material UI is based on Google's Material Design principles, which focus on providing a visually appealing and intuitive user interface across different devices and platforms.
Supported Platforms: Ionic is primarily aimed at developing hybrid mobile applications that can run on multiple platforms like iOS, Android, and the web. It achieves this by using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Material UI, on the other hand, is a React component library that can be used to build web applications. It does not specifically target mobile platforms but can be used to create responsive layouts.
Component Customization: Ionic provides a wide range of customizable UI components out-of-the-box, allowing developers to create visually appealing mobile applications quickly. It also offers theming capabilities to change the look and feel of the components. Material UI, on the other hand, provides highly customizable React components that can be easily tailored to meet the specific design requirements. It offers extensive theming options and allows for greater control over the visual appearance.
Ease of Use: Ionic is known for its simplicity and ease of use, making it a popular choice for developers who want to quickly build mobile applications. It provides a command-line interface (CLI) that helps in scaffolding, debugging, and building the application. Material UI, being a React library, requires some prior knowledge of React and JSX syntax. It might have a steeper learning curve for developers who are new to React.
Integration with Frameworks: Ionic is built on Angular, a popular JavaScript framework for building web applications. It leverages the power of Angular to handle data binding, dependency injection, and other aspects of the application development process. Material UI, on the other hand, is a React component library, and it seamlessly integrates with React's virtual DOM, state management, and event handling system.
Community and Ecosystem: Ionic has a large and active community, with an extensive library of plugins and extensions available for various functionalities. It also provides a marketplace for developers to sell their own Ionic components. Material UI, being a popular React library, also has a vast community support and an ecosystem of third-party libraries and tools. It benefits from React's popularity and the wider JavaScript ecosystem.

Ionic vs Material UI

Overview