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  5. Material Design Lite vs Onsen UI

Material Design Lite vs Onsen UI

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Material Design Lite
Material Design Lite
Stacks697
Followers394
Votes62
GitHub Stars32.2K
Forks5.0K
Onsen UI
Onsen UI
Stacks40
Followers136
Votes11
GitHub Stars8.9K
Forks1.0K

Material Design Lite vs Onsen UI: What are the differences?

Material Design Lite: Material Design Lite Components in HTML/CSS/JS. Material Design Lite (MDL) lets you add a Material Design look and feel to your static content websites. It doesn't rely on any JavaScript frameworks or libraries. Optimized for cross-device use, gracefully degrades in older browsers, and offers an experience that is accessible from the get-go; Onsen UI: HTML5 Hybrid Mobile App UI Framework - work with Angular, React, Vue, Meteor & pure JavaScript. Material & Flat design. Onsen UI helps you develop both hybrid and web apps. If developing hybrid apps, you can use it with the Cordova / PhoneGap command line, or with Monaca tools (CLI, Monaca IDE - cloud-based IDE for Cordova, Localkit - desktop GUI).

Material Design Lite belongs to "Front-End Frameworks" category of the tech stack, while Onsen UI can be primarily classified under "Cross-Platform Mobile Development".

Some of the features offered by Material Design Lite are:

  • Blog Template
  • Dashboard Template
  • Text Heavy Webpage Template

On the other hand, Onsen UI provides the following key features:

  • Open source HTML5 hybrid app framework for PhoneGap & Cordova
  • JavaScript framework agnostic
  • Mobile-optimized HTML5, CSS and JavaScript with Web components

Material Design Lite and Onsen UI are both open source tools. It seems that Material Design Lite with 31.3K GitHub stars and 5.31K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Onsen UI with 7.49K GitHub stars and 869 GitHub forks.

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Detailed Comparison

Material Design Lite
Material Design Lite
Onsen UI
Onsen UI

Material Design Lite (MDL) lets you add a Material Design look and feel to your static content websites. It doesn't rely on any JavaScript frameworks or libraries. Optimized for cross-device use, gracefully degrades in older browsers, and offers an experience that is accessible from the get-go.

Onsen UI helps you develop both hybrid and web apps. If developing hybrid apps, you can use it with the Cordova / PhoneGap command line, or with Monaca tools (CLI, Monaca IDE - cloud-based IDE for Cordova, Localkit - desktop GUI).

Blog template;Dashboard template;Text heavy webpage template; Stand alone article template;
Open source HTML5 hybrid app framework for PhoneGap & Cordova; JavaScript framework agnostic; Mobile-optimized HTML5, CSS and JavaScript with Web components; UI framework; Responsive layout; Material and Flat design; Comprehensive toolset (CLI, IDE, debugger, remote build etc.) provided as Monaca
Statistics
GitHub Stars
32.2K
GitHub Stars
8.9K
GitHub Forks
5.0K
GitHub Forks
1.0K
Stacks
697
Stacks
40
Followers
394
Followers
136
Votes
62
Votes
11
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 23
    Material Design straight from the original creators
  • 11
    Based on bem philosophy
  • 9
    Nice animations
  • 7
    SCSS
  • 5
    Doesn't depend on JavaScript
Pros
  • 3
    Works with any JavaScript framework
  • 3
    Allows for rapid prototyping
  • 3
    Hybrid mobile
  • 2
    Free

What are some alternatives to Material Design Lite, Onsen UI?

Bootstrap

Bootstrap

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

Ionic

Ionic

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.

Flutter

Flutter

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

React Native

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

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

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 UI

Semantic empowers designers and developers by creating a shared vocabulary for UI.

Materialize

Materialize

A CSS Framework based on material design.

Material Design for Angular

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

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.

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