Material Design Lite vs Xamarin: What are the differences?
What is 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.
What is Xamarin? Create iOS, Android and Mac apps in C#. 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.
Material Design Lite belongs to "Front-End Frameworks" category of the tech stack, while Xamarin 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, Xamarin provides the following key features:
- Cross-platform development- Thinking about supporting iOS, Android, Mac and Windows? Xamarin allows you to write it all in C#.
- Reuse existing code- Use your favorite .NET libraries in Xamarin apps. Easily use third-party native libraries and frameworks.
- Discover as you type- Explore APIs as you type with code autocompletion.
"Material Design straight from the original creators" is the top reason why over 23 developers like Material Design Lite, while over 111 developers mention "Power of c# on mobile devices" as the leading cause for choosing Xamarin.
Material Design Lite is an open source tool with 31.3K GitHub stars and 5.32K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Material Design Lite's open source repository on GitHub.
Rdio, Olo, and Rumble are some of the popular companies that use Xamarin, whereas Material Design Lite is used by Google, Troopers, and Boxme. Xamarin has a broader approval, being mentioned in 74 company stacks & 65 developers stacks; compared to Material Design Lite, which is listed in 9 company stacks and 26 developer stacks.
