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Material Design vs Semantic UI: What are the differences?
# Introduction
Material Design and Semantic UI are two popular front-end frameworks used in web development. While both frameworks aim to make designing beautiful and functional websites easier, they have key differences that designers and developers should consider before choosing one over the other.
1. **Design Philosophy**: Material Design follows Google's design principles, focusing on simplicity, clean typography, and vibrant colors. Semantic UI, on the other hand, emphasizes readability and ease of use, with a more compact design aesthetic that prioritizes information hierarchy.
2. **Component Library**: Material Design offers a comprehensive library of pre-built components, including buttons, cards, and navigation bars, designed to work seamlessly together. Semantic UI also provides a wide range of components, but they are more customizable and modular, allowing developers to mix and match elements more freely.
3. **Customization Options**: While Material Design has a distinct visual style that may be difficult to deviate from, Semantic UI offers more flexibility in terms of customization. Developers can easily modify the look and feel of Semantic UI components to better fit the brand or aesthetic of a particular website.
4. **Community Support**: Material Design benefits from the vast resources and community support of Google, making it easier for developers to find tutorials, plugins, and solutions to common problems. Semantic UI also has a strong community, but it may not be as extensive as that of Material Design.
5. **Documentation**: Material Design provides extensive documentation and guidelines on how to use its components effectively, ensuring a consistent user experience across different platforms. Semantic UI documentation is also robust, but it may require more exploration to fully understand the framework and its capabilities.
6. **Browser Compatibility**: Material Design is optimized for Google Chrome and may not display as intended on other browsers. Semantic UI, on the other hand, aims for cross-browser compatibility, ensuring a consistent user experience across different platforms and devices.
In Summary, Material Design and Semantic UI offer distinct design philosophies, component libraries, customization options, community support levels, documentation quality, and browser compatibility, making them suitable for different project requirements and design preferences.
I am a bit confused when to choose Bootstrap vs Material Design or Tailwind CSS, and why? I mean, in which kind of projects we can work with bootstrap/Material/Tailwind CSS? If the design is made up on the grid, we prefer bootstrap, and if flat design, then material design. Similarly, when do we choose tailwind CSS?
Any suggestion would be appreciated?
Hi Ashish,
If you need minimal work to be done from your end and like most of the components / design available out of the box - go with Bootstrap. This is the oldest and has the widest adoption and a whole range of components built out by others.
If you like Material design, this is a good choice too. Please note that Bootstrap also has a Material theme, though it is not as native.
Both of these above frameworks are bulky and has more than what you may need.
If you like to build micro-components in a elegant way, TailwindCSS is the way to go.
I don't know about material design.
You would go with Bootstrap if you want to prototype / build something without bothering about the design at all and you are OK if everything looks kinda template-y, using bootstrap out of the box components.
Go with Tailwind if you need a sleek design, a user interface where building with components will be important (because tailwind strongly favors component-based UI), and you know you will need to extend the built-in classes with your own (because tailwind is very easy to extend)
I would personally recommend tailwind over bootstrap any day of the week.
Tailwind is great you don't have to mess with naming things and it is so much more flexible than the cookie cutter bootstrap, but I don't know about material UI. I recommend tailwind it's super simple to learn and has great code snippets.
Put simply, you should use Tailwind regardless. It is a great addition to whatever you use because it removes the hassle of writing CSS.
Ant Design offers the most components with JS and CSS taken care of. They look clean, professional, and usable.
We paired this with Bulma for making the containers and structure reactive. Bulma (for react) make it easy to just add a section, container, and content and have it work on all platforms.
We also use Geist UI, though not recognized by Stack share, for its simple and modern feel. Highly recommend Geist if you want modern components for complicated UI's
Pros of Material Design
- They really set a new bar in design5
- An intuitive design4
- Simply, And Beautiful3
- Many great libraries2
- Composants0
Pros of Semantic UI
- Easy to use and looks elegant157
- Variety of components92
- Themes64
- Has out-of-the-box widgets i would actually use61
- Semantic, duh57
- Its the future44
- Open source42
- Very active development37
- Far less complicated structure31
- Gulp28
- Already has more features than bootstrap9
- Just compare it to Bootstrap and you'll be hooked8
- Clean and consistent markup model7
- UI components7
- Responsiveness6
- Because it is semantic :-D4
- Elegant. clean. readable. maintainable4
- Good-Looking4
- Is big and look really great, nothing like this2
- Consistent2
- Great docs2
- Modular and scalable2
- Easy to use1
- Blends with reactjs1
- Jquery1
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Cons of Material Design
- Sometimes, it can hang the browser2
Cons of Semantic UI
- Outdated build tool (gulp 3))5
- Poor accessibility support3
- HTML is not semantic (see list component)3
- Javascript is tied to jquery2
