Material Design for Angular vs Polymer: What are the differences?
What is Material Design for Angular? Material Design for AngularJS Apps. 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.
What is Polymer? A new library built on top of Web Components, designed to leverage the evolving web platform on modern browsers. Polymer is a new type of library for the web, designed to leverage the existing browser infrastructure to provide the encapsulation and extendability currently only available in JS libraries. Polymer is based on a set of future technologies, including Shadow DOM, Custom Elements and Model Driven Views. Currently these technologies are implemented as polyfills or shims, but as browsers adopt these features natively, the platform code that drives Polymer evacipates, leaving only the value-adds.
Material Design for Angular and Polymer belong to "Front-End Frameworks" category of the tech stack.
"Ui components" is the primary reason why developers consider Material Design for Angular over the competitors, whereas "Web components" was stated as the key factor in picking Polymer.
Material Design for Angular and Polymer are both open source tools. Polymer with 21.1K GitHub stars and 2K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Material Design for Angular with 16.5K GitHub stars and 3.57K GitHub forks.
Movielala, Bannerman, and inFeedo are some of the popular companies that use Material Design for Angular, whereas Polymer is used by AX Semantics, USERcycle, and Telemetry. Material Design for Angular has a broader approval, being mentioned in 286 company stacks & 381 developers stacks; compared to Polymer, which is listed in 42 company stacks and 32 developer stacks.