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Material Design vs Material-UI: What are the differences?

Material Design and Material-UI are two popular design systems used in building user interfaces. Here are the key differences between Material Design and Material-UI:

  1. Origin and Purpose: Material Design is a design language developed by Google for creating visually appealing and consistent user interfaces across different platforms. It provides a comprehensive set of design patterns, components, and guidelines for creating intuitive and delightful user experiences. Material-UI, on the other hand, is a React component library that implements the Material Design principles. It provides pre-built components and styles that follow the Material Design guidelines, making it easier for developers to build UIs in a consistent and visually appealing manner.

  2. Implementation: Material Design is a versatile design language applicable to web, mobile, and desktop platforms. It offers comprehensive guidelines for developers and designers. Material-UI, tailored for React apps, is a collection of reusable components adhering to Material Design principles, simplifying UI development and integration in React applications.

  3. Customization and Theming: Material Design offers extensive customization options for designers and developers, including color palettes, typography, shape, and layout. Material-UI, a React component library, provides a flexible theming system for easy customization of component appearance and seamless integration with custom styles.

  4. Ecosystem and Community: Material Design has a large and active community of designers and developers who contribute to the evolution and adoption of the design language. It has extensive documentation, resources, and design tools to support the implementation of Material Design across different platforms. Material-UI, being a popular React component library, has its own active community of users and contributors. It offers additional features and utilities specific to React development and benefits from the broader React ecosystem.

In summary, Material Design is a design language developed by Google, providing guidelines and principles for creating visually appealing and consistent user interfaces. Material-UI is a React component library that implements the Material Design principles, offering pre-built components and styles for building UIs in React applications. Material Design serves as a design language applicable to various platforms, while Material-UI offers a ready-to-use component library for React applications.

Advice on Material Design and Material-UI
Ashish Sharma
Sr. UI Associate at Daffodil Software · | 5 upvotes · 722.8K views

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?

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Replies (4)

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.

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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.

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Recommends
on
Tailwind CSSTailwind CSS

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.

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on
Tailwind CSSTailwind CSS

Put simply, you should use Tailwind regardless. It is a great addition to whatever you use because it removes the hassle of writing CSS.

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Decisions about Material Design and Material-UI
Ryan Wans

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

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Kexin Lin
at University of Toronto · | 8 upvotes · 274.7K views

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.

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Xinyi Liu
Software Developer at BigClarity · | 6 upvotes · 350.3K views

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.

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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

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Pros of Material Design
Pros of Material-UI
  • 5
    They really set a new bar in design
  • 4
    An intuitive design
  • 3
    Simply, And Beautiful
  • 2
    Many great libraries
  • 0
    Composants
  • 141
    React
  • 82
    Material Design
  • 60
    Ui components
  • 30
    CSS framework
  • 26
    Component
  • 15
    Looks great
  • 13
    Responsive
  • 12
    Good documentation
  • 9
    LESS
  • 8
    Ui component
  • 7
    Open source
  • 6
    Flexible
  • 6
    Code examples
  • 5
    JSS
  • 3
    Supports old browsers out of the box
  • 3
    Interface
  • 3
    Angular
  • 3
    Very accessible
  • 3
    Fun
  • 2
    Typescript support
  • 2
    # of components
  • 2
    Designed for Server Side Rendering
  • 1
    Support for multiple styling systems
  • 1
    Accessibility
  • 1
    Easy to work with
  • 1
    Css

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Cons of Material Design
Cons of Material-UI
  • 2
    Sometimes, it can hang the browser
  • 36
    Hard to learn. Bad documentation
  • 29
    Hard to customize
  • 22
    Hard to understand Docs
  • 9
    Bad performance
  • 7
    Extra library needed for date/time pickers
  • 7
    For editable table component need to use material-table
  • 2
    Typescript Support
  • 1
    # of components

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What is Material Design?

Material Design is a unified system that combines theory, resources, and tools for crafting digital experiences.

What is Material-UI?

Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design.

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What companies use Material Design?
What companies use Material-UI?
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What tools integrate with Material Design?
What tools integrate with Material-UI?

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What are some alternatives to Material Design and Material-UI?
Bootstrap
Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.
Material Design Lite
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.
Flat UI
Flat UI is a beautiful theme for Bootstrap. We have redesigned many of its components to look flat in every pixel.
Ant Design
An enterprise-class UI design language and React-based implementation. Graceful UI components out of the box, base on React Component. A npm + webpack + babel + dora + dva development framework.
Material
Express your creativity with Material, an animation and graphics framework for Google's Material Design and Apple's Flat UI in Swift.
See all alternatives