Home
Application and Data
Languages & Frameworks
CSS Pre-processors / Extensions

Less vs Materialize

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Less
2.5K
1.2K
+ 1
930
Materialize
691
1.2K
+ 1
557
Add tool

Less vs Materialize: What are the differences?

Developers describe Less as "The dynamic stylesheet language". Less is a CSS pre-processor, meaning that it extends the CSS language, adding features that allow variables, mixins, functions and many other techniques that allow you to make CSS that is more maintainable, themable and extendable. On the other hand, Materialize is detailed as "A modern responsive front-end framework based on Material Design". A CSS Framework based on material design.

Less can be classified as a tool in the "CSS Pre-processors / Extensions" category, while Materialize is grouped under "Front-End Frameworks".

"Better than css", "Variables" and "Mixins" are the key factors why developers consider Less; whereas "Google material design", "Responsive" and "Easy to use" are the primary reasons why Materialize is favored.

Less and Materialize are both open source tools. It seems that Materialize with 36.1K GitHub stars and 4.8K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Less with 16.1K GitHub stars and 3.46K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Less has a broader approval, being mentioned in 498 company stacks & 169 developers stacks; compared to Materialize, which is listed in 46 company stacks and 56 developer stacks.

Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
Learn More
Pros of Less
Pros of Materialize
  • 215
    Better than css
  • 177
    Variables
  • 141
    Mixins
  • 99
    Maintainable
  • 79
    Used by bootstrap
  • 55
    Open source
  • 50
    Extendable
  • 43
    Functions
  • 39
    Dynamic
  • 30
    Fast
  • 2
    CSS is valid LESS, very easy to pick up
  • 102
    Google material design
  • 74
    Easy to use
  • 74
    Responsive
  • 54
    Modern looks
  • 48
    Open source
  • 42
    Good documentation
  • 37
    Code examples
  • 29
    Extremely light - 29kb
  • 28
    Flexible
  • 15
    Great Support
  • 10
    It looks beautiful
  • 8
    Very nice looking components to quickly build out
  • 7
    Smooth animation
  • 6
    Great Grid System
  • 4
    Great
  • 4
    Ruby gem to integrate in 2 seconds flat
  • 3
    Angular2 Support
  • 2
    MIT Lisence
  • 2
    Friendly api, easy setup, good documentation
  • 2
    Easy setup
  • 1
    React
  • 1
    Grid system
  • 1
    Because of the easy to use and very editable library
  • 1
    Responsivness
  • 1
    Jibberish
  • 1
    Friendly Api
  • 0
    Better class name
  • 0
    Rtl support

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Less
Cons of Materialize
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 7
      Mobile errors
    • 6
      Poor Grid System
    • 2
      Unmaintained

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    What is Less?

    Less is a CSS pre-processor, meaning that it extends the CSS language, adding features that allow variables, mixins, functions and many other techniques that allow you to make CSS that is more maintainable, themable and extendable.

    What is Materialize?

    A CSS Framework based on material design.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Less?
    What companies use Materialize?
    Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
    Learn More

    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with Less?
    What tools integrate with Materialize?

    Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

    Blog Posts

    How MapJam Is Building A Scalable Custom Maps Service
    Jul 29 2016 at 2:27AM

    MapJam

    JavaScriptGitHubNode.js+26
    20
    5023
    What are some alternatives to Less and Materialize?
    CSS 3
    CSS3 is the latest evolution of the Cascading Style Sheets language and aims at extending CSS2.1. It brings a lot of long-awaited novelties, like rounded corners, shadows, gradients, transitions or animations, as well as new layouts like multi-columns, flexible box or grid layouts. Experimental parts are vendor-prefixed and should either be avoided in production environments, or used with extreme caution as both their syntax and semantics can change in the future.
    Sass
    Sass is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It's translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin.
    JavaScript
    JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
    Python
    Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.
    Node.js
    Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.
    See all alternatives

    Related Comparisons

    Less vs Sass vs StylusBootstrap vs Foundation vs MaterializeBootstrap vs Material Design for Angular vs MaterializeMaterial-UI vs MaterializeBootstrap vs Materialize vs Semantic UI

    Trending Comparisons

    Django vs Laravel vs Node.jsBootstrap vs Foundation vs Material-UINode.js vs Spring BootFlyway vs LiquibaseAWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

    Top Comparisons

    Postman vs Swagger UIHipChat vs Mattermost vs SlackBitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLabBootstrap vs Materialize