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Material Design for Angular vs Material UI: What are the differences?
Introduction:
In the world of web development, Material Design for Angular and Material UI are two popular design systems that provide pre-built components and guidelines for creating visually appealing and user-friendly websites. While both frameworks aim to follow the principles of Material Design, there are key differences between them that developers need to consider when choosing which one to use for their projects.
Design philosophy and community support: Material Design for Angular is developed and maintained by the Angular team at Google. It is tightly integrated with the Angular framework and provides a set of components that follow Material Design guidelines. On the other hand, Material UI is a design system developed by the React community and provides React-specific components that align with Material Design principles. The community support and active development for both frameworks may vary depending on the popularity and adoption of Angular and React within the developer community.
Integration with frameworks: Material Design for Angular is specifically designed for use with the Angular framework. It offers a seamless integration experience with Angular projects, making it easy to incorporate the pre-built components into Angular applications. Material UI, on the other hand, is built specifically for React applications. It provides a wide range of customizable React components that can be easily integrated into React projects. Therefore, the choice of framework also plays a significant role in deciding whether to opt for Material Design for Angular or Material UI.
Component availability and customization: Material Design for Angular offers a comprehensive set of Material Design components that are specifically designed for Angular applications. These components are pre-styled and ready to be used, reducing the amount of manual CSS styling required. Material UI, on the other hand, provides a rich collection of React components that can be used to build Material Design interfaces. These components are highly customizable and allow developers to tailor the appearance and behavior according to their specific needs. While Material Design for Angular may have a more extensive set of Angular-specific components, Material UI provides greater flexibility in terms of customizability.
Documentation and learning resources: The availability and quality of documentation and learning resources can greatly impact the developer experience when working with a design system. Material Design for Angular benefits from Google's extensive documentation, which includes detailed explanations, examples, and guidelines specific to using Material Design with Angular. Material UI, on the other hand, has a vibrant community-driven documentation ecosystem with a strong focus on examples, tutorials, and third-party contributions. Developers may find it helpful to consider their preference for the documentation style and availability of learning resources when choosing between Material Design for Angular and Material UI.
Component theming and styling: Both Material Design for Angular and Material UI provide mechanisms for theming and styling components. Material Design for Angular leverages Angular's styling capabilities, such as CSS classes and global theme files, to achieve theming and styling. Material UI, on the other hand, utilizes the styling solution offered by the underlying React framework, be it inline styles, CSS-in-JS libraries like styled-components, or external styling libraries like CSS modules. The choice of component theming and styling approach may depend on the developer's familiarity with the styling solutions provided by Angular and React.
Ecosystem and compatibility: The availability of third-party libraries, extensions, and compatibility with other tools can be crucial factors when considering a design system. Material Design for Angular benefits from being a part of the Angular ecosystem, which includes a wide range of libraries and tools that are specifically built for Angular projects. It also has better compatibility with Angular-specific development tools and features. Material UI, on the other hand, being a part of the React ecosystem, has access to a different set of libraries and tools that are more React-centric. The choice of ecosystem and compatibility considerations may depend on the developer's existing tech stack and the availability of required integrations.
In summary, Material Design for Angular and Material UI have differences in terms of their design philosophy and community support, integration with frameworks, component availability and customization, documentation and learning resources, component theming and styling, as well as ecosystem and compatibility factors. Developers should evaluate these differences and consider their project requirements, familiarity with Angular or React, and the level of customization needed to make an informed decision about which design system to choose.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Material Design for Angular
- Ui components122
- Backed by google63
- Free51
- Backed by angular51
- Javascript47
- Open source34
- Responsiveness33
- Easy to learn30
- Quick to develop28
- Customizable20
- Powerful8
- Easy to start8
- Flexible6
- Themes5
- Flexbox Layouts4
- Great community3
- I like its design3
- Great extensions2
- Consistents1
- CDK1
- It's the best looking out of the box1
- Seamless integration with AngularJS but lack of docs1
- Progressive Web Apps - to learn0
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 Material Design for Angular
- No practical examples4
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
