Material-UI vs reactstrap: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Material-UI and reactstrap, both of which are popular libraries for building user interfaces in React applications.

1. Styling Approach - Material-UI follows the Material Design guidelines provided by Google, providing a modern and sleek visual style out of the box. It comes with its own set of pre-designed components and a robust theming system to customize the appearance. In contrast, reactstrap is based on Bootstrap, which offers a more traditional and widely-used design language. It provides a large number of ready-to-use Bootstrap components and styles. So, the main difference here lies in the visual style and the design philosophy they adhere to.

2. Component Selection - Material-UI offers a wide variety of components, ranging from buttons and forms to navigation menus and complex data tables. It provides a comprehensive set of components that cover almost every aspect of an application's interface. On the other hand, reactstrap provides a smaller set of components compared to Material-UI. It focuses more on providing essential UI elements and relies on Bootstrap's responsive grid system for layout flexibility. Therefore, Material-UI has a broader range and more specialized components compared to reactstrap.

3. Customization and Theming - Material-UI enables extensive customization through its theming system. It allows developers to override default styles, create custom themes, and apply them globally or locally to different components. The theming system also supports dynamically changing the theme during runtime. In contrast, reactstrap provides limited customization options out of the box. It mainly relies on CSS classes and stylesheets for customization. Although it supports CSS-in-JS through libraries like styled-components, it does not offer a built-in theming system like Material-UI.

4. Integration with Other Libraries - Material-UI is primarily built for React applications and is tightly integrated with React's component lifecycle and ecosystem. It provides seamless integration with React features like hooks, context, and routing libraries. On the other hand, reactstrap is a wrapper around the Bootstrap framework and can be used in both React and non-React applications. Therefore, reactstrap might be more suitable for projects that do not exclusively use React or require integration with non-React libraries.

5. Popularity and Community Support - Material-UI has gained significant popularity in the React community and has a large and active community of developers. It has a comprehensive documentation, regular updates, and a large number of contributors. Thus, developers can benefit from the extensive knowledge base, community support, and a wide range of resources available for Material-UI. Reactstrap also has a decent community support, but it might not be as extensive as Material-UI due to its narrower focus.

6. Bundle Size and Performance - Material-UI provides a highly optimized production bundle with tree shaking support, allowing applications to include only the necessary components. It utilizes modern JavaScript features and techniques for optimizing performance. However, the bundle size of Material-UI can be relatively larger compared to reactstrap, especially when using a wide range of components and features. Reactstrap, being built on Bootstrap, aims for a smaller bundle size and emphasizes performance by following best practices recommended by Bootstrap.

In summary, Material-UI and reactstrap differ in their styling approach, component selection, customization options, integration with other libraries, popularity, and performance considerations. Understanding these differences can help developers make an informed decision while choosing between these two libraries for their React projects.