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Material-UI

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Material UI vs Pure: What are the differences?

Key Differences: Material UI vs Pure

Material UI and Pure are two popular front-end frameworks used for developing websites. While both frameworks have their own advantages, there are several key differences that set them apart from each other.

  1. Design Approach: Material UI follows the Material Design guidelines, which focus on creating a modern and visually appealing interface. It offers a wide range of pre-designed components and styles to choose from, making it easier to create a consistent design across the application. On the other hand, Pure provides a minimalistic and lightweight design approach, allowing developers to build custom interfaces without any predefined styles or components.

  2. Component Library: Material UI provides an extensive collection of ready-to-use components, such as buttons, forms, grids, and navigation elements. These components are highly customizable and can be easily integrated into any project. In contrast, Pure offers a smaller set of components, mainly focusing on the basic building blocks like grids, tables, and forms. Developers using Pure have more flexibility in terms of creating custom components according to their specific needs.

  3. Styling Options: Material UI facilitates the use of CSS-in-JS, allowing developers to write styles within their JavaScript code using libraries like JSS. This approach provides a scope-based styling solution and simplifies the management of styles for individual components. Pure, on the other hand, follows a more traditional CSS approach, where developers can apply styles directly using CSS classes or inline styles. This gives developers more control over styling but may require stricter class naming conventions to avoid conflicts.

  4. Framework Dependencies: Material UI is primarily built for React, one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks. It leverages the power of React's virtual DOM and component-based architecture to provide a seamless development experience. Pure, on the other hand, is a standalone framework that can be used with any JavaScript framework or library. It does not have any specific dependencies and can be easily integrated into existing projects without major modifications.

  5. Documentation and Community Support: Material UI has a well-documented and comprehensive user guide, along with a large and active community. This makes it easier for developers to find solutions to their queries and get support from the community. Pure, although it has a decent documentation, may have a relatively smaller community size and support due to its niche use case.

  6. Size and Performance: Material UI, being a more feature-rich framework, comes with a larger file size. This can impact the initial load time of the website, especially on slower networks. Pure, with its minimalistic design approach, has a smaller footprint and can help improve the overall performance and loading speed of the website.

In Summary, Material UI offers a visually appealing and feature-rich UI design approach, with an extensive component library and convenient styling options, specifically tailored for React. On the other hand, Pure follows a minimalistic and lightweight design approach, focusing on flexibility and customizability, making it suitable for various JavaScript frameworks or libraries.

Advice on Material-UI and Pure
Needs advice
on
Material-UIMaterial-UI
and
reactstrapreactstrap

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?

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Replies (8)

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

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Recommends
on
Material-UIMaterial-UI

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.

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Robert Smith
Tech Delivery Manager at self · | 2 upvotes · 34.2K views
Recommends

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.

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Recommends

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.

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Recommends
on
Material-UIMaterial-UI

Material-UI looks great and is easy to use. Highly recommended, my favourite UI framework for React.

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Recommends
on
Material-UIMaterial-UI

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

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Malik Bagwala
Front-end Developer at Vesatogo Innovations · | 1 upvotes · 34.3K views
Recommends
on
Chakra UIChakra UI

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.

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Flavio Ribeiro
REACT DEVELOPER at Beblue · | 1 upvotes · 34.1K views
Recommends
on
Material-UIMaterial-UI

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.

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Decisions about Material-UI and Pure

Bootstrap is useful for rapid prototyping using an existing design system. Since the design system can be used in standard HTML + Javascript and can be imported for free into a Figma project, it lowers the complexity of our mock-up creation and frontend styling, all while promoting consistency. We did not choose Material UI, because it does not have a free design system to import into Figma.

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Kexin Lin
at University of Toronto · | 8 upvotes · 275.9K 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 · 351.9K 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-UI
Pros of Pure
  • 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
  • 14
    Lightweight
  • 10
    Simple
  • 10
    Responsive
  • 9
    Minimalist
  • 4
    Pure
  • 4
    Css
  • 3
    Open source
  • 3
    Neutral style
  • 2
    Consistently
  • 1
    It just works
  • 1
    Small footprint

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Cons of Material-UI
Cons of Pure
  • 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-UI?

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

    What is Pure?

    Pure is meant to be a starting point for every website or web app. We take care of all the CSS work that every site needs, without making it look cookie-cutter.

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    What companies use Material-UI?
    What companies use Pure?
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    What tools integrate with Material-UI?
    What tools integrate with Pure?
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      What are some alternatives to Material-UI and Pure?
      Kendo UI
      Fast, light, complete: 70+ jQuery-based UI widgets in one powerful toolset. AngularJS integration, Bootstrap support, mobile controls, offline data solution.
      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.
      react-md
      React MD is Google's Material Design specifications implemented with Sass and React. The goal of the project is to create components that adhere to the Material Design specifications.
      Angular Material
      Sprint from Zero to App. Hit the ground running with comprehensive, modern UI components that work across the web, mobile and desktop. It allows to create material styled angular apps fast and easy.
      See all alternatives