Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Flat UI vs Material UI: What are the differences?
Visual Design: Flat UI features flat design elements like minimalism, simplicity, and clean typography, providing a simple and sleek look. In contrast, Material UI includes material design aspects such as layered elements, shadows, and animations that mimic real-world interactions, creating a more dynamic and engaging user experience.
Color Scheme: Flat UI typically utilizes a limited color palette with bold, primary colors to enhance visual appeal and contrast. On the other hand, Material UI employs a more extensive color system based on Material Design guidelines, including vibrant accent colors, creating a more visually stimulating and interactive interface for users.
Typography: In Flat UI, typography is straightforward and usually consists of sans-serif fonts to maintain the minimalist aesthetic. Meanwhile, Material UI incorporates a combination of typography styles, including a variety of fonts and font weights, to create hierarchy and emphasize different elements on the interface.
Depth and Dimension: Flat UI design elements appear flat on the screen without any depth or dimension, providing a more two-dimensional look. In contrast, Material UI uses shadows, layers, and animations to create a sense of depth, guiding users through the interface and enhancing visual hierarchy and usability.
User Interaction: Flat UI focuses on simplicity and usability, with a minimalistic approach to user interactions like button clicks and transitions. Material UI, on the other hand, incorporates motion and animations to provide users with visual feedback and guide them through different actions, enhancing the overall user experience.
Adoption and Ecosystem: Flat UI has been popular among designers and developers for its simplicity and ease of use, leading to a wide variety of resources and themes available for implementation. Material UI, as part of Google's Material Design system, has a strong community support and extensive documentation, making it a preferred choice for projects that require scalability and consistency.
In Summary, the key differences between Flat UI and Material UI lie in their visual design approaches, color schemes, typography styles, depth and dimension implementation, user interactions, and adoption within the design community.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 Flat UI
- Sass support1
- CSS class naming conventions are similar to Bootstrap1
- Good for mockups and minimal UI design1
- Basic Flat design1
Pros of Material-UI
- React141
- Material Design82
- Ui components60
- CSS framework30
- Component25
- Looks great14
- Responsive12
- Good documentation12
- LESS9
- Ui component8
- Open source7
- Code examples6
- Flexible6
- JSS5
- Angular3
- Very accessible3
- Fun3
- Supports old browsers out of the box3
- Typescript support2
- # of components2
- Interface2
- Designed for Server Side Rendering2
- Support for multiple styling systems1
- Css1
- Easy to work with1
- Accessibility1
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Flat UI
- Not for creative and modern UI design1
Cons of Material-UI
- Hard to learn. Bad documentation35
- Hard to customize28
- Hard to understand Docs21
- Bad performance8
- Extra library needed for date/time pickers7
- For editable table component need to use material-table7
- Typescript Support2
- # of components1
