Materialize vs Polymer: What are the differences?

Developers describe Materialize as "A modern responsive front-end framework based on Material Design". A CSS Framework based on material design. On the other hand, Polymer is detailed as "A new library built on top of Web Components, designed to leverage the evolving web platform on modern browsers". Polymer is a new type of library for the web, designed to leverage the existing browser infrastructure to provide the encapsulation and extendability currently only available in JS libraries. Polymer is based on a set of future technologies, including Shadow DOM, Custom Elements and Model Driven Views. Currently these technologies are implemented as polyfills or shims, but as browsers adopt these features natively, the platform code that drives Polymer evacipates, leaving only the value-adds.

Materialize and Polymer belong to "Front-End Frameworks" category of the tech stack.

"Google material design" is the primary reason why developers consider Materialize over the competitors, whereas "Web components" was stated as the key factor in picking Polymer.

Materialize and Polymer are both open source tools. It seems that Materialize with 36.1K GitHub stars and 4.8K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Polymer with 21.1K GitHub stars and 2K GitHub forks.

The3ballsoft, GeoLytix, and Avhana Health are some of the popular companies that use Materialize, whereas Polymer is used by AX Semantics, USERcycle, and Telemetry. Materialize has a broader approval, being mentioned in 46 company stacks & 55 developers stacks; compared to Polymer, which is listed in 42 company stacks and 32 developer stacks.